Meeting Abstract
117.4 Tuesday, Jan. 7 11:00 Plasticity of the mate choice: a courter male evokes choice-like brain response in a coercive female WANG, S.*; RAMSEY, M.; CUMMINGS, M.; Univ. of Texas, Austin; Univ. of Texas, Austin; Univ. of Texas, Austin silu.wang@utexas.edu
Female mate choice is fundamental to sexual selection, and determining genetic underpinnings of female preference variation is important for understanding mating character evolution. Previously it was shown that whole brain expression of a synaptic plasticity marker, neuroserpin, positively correlates with mating bias in the female choice poeciliid, Xiphophorus nigrensis, when exposed to conspecific courting males, whereas this relationship is reversed in Gambusia affinis, a mate coercive poeciliid with no courting males. Here we explore whether species-level differences in female mating response are driven by divergent genetic functions in female brains or instead by variation in male phenotypes. We exposed female G. affinis to conspecific males, coercer male Poecilia latipinna, courter male P. latipinna, and conspecific females for preference assays followed by whole brain gene expression analyses of neuroserpin, egr-1, and early B. We found positive correlations between gene expression and female preference strength during exposure to a courting heterospecific male, but a reversed pattern following exposure to coercive heterospecific male. This suggests that the neural activity of mate choice-associated genes is plastic to courting versus coercive males rather than intrinsically wired to mating systems. Further, we propose that female plasticity may involve learning because female association patterns shifted with experience. We found larger, more experienced females spent less time associating with coercive males but more time with males in the presence of courting males than younger females. We thus suggest a conserved learning-based neurogenetic process underlying the diversity of female mate preference across the mate choice and coercion-driven mating systems.
