Meeting Abstract

P1.18  Thursday, Jan. 3  Heritability of call duration in male gray treefrogs: Do female mating preferences lead to �sexy sons�? WATTERS, L.V.**; SMITH, M.J.; GERHARDT, H.C.; WELCH, A.M.; College of Charleston, SC; Arthur Rylah Institute, Victoria, AU; Univ. of Missouri, Columbia; College of Charleston, SC; Univ. of Missouri, Columbia lvwatter@edisto.cofc.edu

The evolution of mating preferences can be favored when females gain the indirect benefit of producing offspring with enhanced fitness. Such indirect benefits can result if preferred males provide offspring with a genetic advantage in terms of enhanced viability, enhanced sexual attractiveness, or both. An important feature of indirect benefits models of sexual selection is heritability of male display traits, which enables choosy females to gain the benefit of attractive sons and also allows positive coevolution between female preference and a male display (i.e., the Fisherian process). However, the assumption that sexually-selected traits are heritable has seldom been tested, particularly in long-lived vertebrates. We measured the heritability of call duration and other call characteristics in gray treefrogs, Hyla versicolor. Call duration is an important sexually-selected trait in this species: male gray treefrogs show repeatable variation in call duration, and females prefer male advertisement calls of longer duration. We used artificial fertilizations to generate full- and half-sibling offspring of 24 males and 6 females. These offspring were raised to reproductive maturity in the laboratory, and calls of male offspring were recorded in a controlled chorus environment. These data allow us to estimate the heritability of a sexually-selected trait by determining the degree to which call duration of fathers predicts call duration of their sons. Our results provide a test of the �sexy son� hypothesis, that female preferences for attractive male traits can be favored by the indirect benefit of attractive of male offspring.