Meeting Abstract
Advertisement vocalizations can attract mates, deter rivals, aid in species recognition, and drive reproductive isolation. Because adaptation relies on heritable variation, examining the heritability (h2) of acoustic variation is critical to understanding the evolution of vocalizations and the species that make them. Alston’s singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina) is a small and diurnal species that lives in cloud forests of Central America. We used a combination of breeding studies and genomics-based methods to test for heritable variation in song structure among these mice both in the lab and field. We first took advantage of geographic variation in song effort to experimentally examine whether heritable variation contributes to intraspecific differences in song. We caught animals from Costa Rica and Panama, populations that naturally differ in song length. We reared animals from each of these sites in captivity, and crossed them to produce F1 and F2 animals, recording songs from each of these three generations. Population differences in song elaboration were maintained in lab-reared animals, suggesting a heritable basis to population differences, with F1 and F2 animals exhibiting intermediate song lengths. Next, we estimated the heritability of song within a Costa Rican population. We recorded songs and collected DNA from wild-caught mice. We used RAD-seq to generate SNPs from each individual and to calculate a genomewide relatedness matrix (GRM). Finally, we fit generalized linear mixed models to calculate h2 of song. Our preliminary results estimate h2 to be between 0.2 – 0.4 for different aspects of song. Together our data support the hypothesis that there is heritable variation in song structure both within and among populations of singing mice.
