Natural and Sexual Selection in a Wild Insect Population

Abstract

Insects in the Wild Insects are of fundamental importance to terrestrial ecosystems and provide laboratory model systems for the study of physiology and genetics. Studies examining how natural and sexual selection operate to drive evolution in wild populations have often neglected invertebrates, resulting in a chasm between our understandings of how things work in the lab versus the natural environment. Rodríguez-Muñoz et al. (p. 1269 ; see the Perspective by Zuk ) bridge this gap by comprehensively monitoring the life histories, behavior, and reproductive success of an entire population of field crickets. Adding genetic data allowed evaluation of how behavior impacts reproductive success and confirmed that male reproductive success varies more than that of females.