Written by Paul W. Sherman
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Animal behaviour

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Written by Paul W. Sherman
Last Updated

Evolutionary history of behaviour

Biologists have always been fascinated with the question of where the traits that exist today came from—that is, their evolutionary history. However, exploration of the history of behaviours and their underlying mechanisms is exceptionally challenging. (Unfortunately, the fossil record is largely uninformative.) Only under rare circumstances, such as the discovery of a fossilized dinosaur nest topped by an adult (a situation suggestive of parental care), is there sufficient information captured in fossils to enable paleontologists to draw inferences about the origin and subsequent evolution of complex social or reproductive behaviours. As a result, it has been necessary to develop alternative and indirect approaches to infer evolutionary histories of behaviours.

Character mapping

The first approach, called character mapping, begins by constructing a phylogenetic tree (that is, a depiction of the presumed relationship of a species of interest to its closest living relatives). Phylogeny refers to the evolutionary history of one or a group of interrelated species. Hypotheses regarding phylogenetic relationships often are based on similarities among existing species in morphological traits and DNA sequences. Once the phylogenetic tree is established, character states, or behaviours (such as parental care), of extant species are attached, or “mapped,” to it. Sites on the tree called ancestral nodes are drawn where changes in the behaviour of interest apparently occurs. This is accomplished by minimizing the number of character state transitions, or changes, necessary to account for all the diversity seen among the related species today. In other words, the shortest evolutionary path taken by any character from its origin to the present is considered to be the “most parsimonious” (that is, requiring the fewest changes) and, therefore, the most probable. Assuming that the behaviours of extant species have remained the same since the last speciation event in their lineage and that the shortest evolutionary path is indeed most likely, a hypothesis can be formulated about the relative timing of the origins of various behaviours and their subsequent loss or evolutionary modification. These assumptions are most valid for complex behaviours whose evolution required many improbable changes rather than highly variable (plastic) behaviours. Moreover, it is more reasonable to suppose that a complex behaviour that is shared by two or more species was present in a common ancestor than that it evolved multiple times independently.

Phylogenetic reconstructions and character mapping have been used to infer the historical trajectories of male secondary sexual characteristics and female mating preferences in several taxa, such as Central American frogs (Physalaemus) and swordtail fishes (Xiphophorus). In the frogs, electrophysiological studies of present-day species indicate that females have identical auditory preferences regardless of the acoustic characteristics of the mating calls of the males. The most parsimonious hypothesis, therefore, is that female preferences evolved first (that is, they are ancestral or older), and that male calls evolved secondarily in some species to take advantage of these preexisting preferences. In the swordtail fishes, females in species with and without swords prefer males with artificial swords attached to their caudal fins over unsworded males. The hypothesis that ancestral females possessed the preference for a swordlike structure is more parsimonious than that the preference for swords evolved multiple times independently in the lineage of each existing species.

One general problem with the character mapping approach is that the most parsimonious evolutionary pathway may not be the most likely. Evolutionary change is seldom unidirectional, so small changes in characters in one direction or the other may have occurred multiple times over the evolutionary history of a species group. A more specific problem with inferring the evolutionary history of sexually selected characters using character mapping is that it is often difficult to determine exactly what aspects of a male trait females prefer. With reference to swordtail fishes, it is unclear whether females have specific preferences for a trait (such as the sword) not possessed by the males or whether females are attracted to any tail modifications that are indicative of male viability or fertility in general (such as relatively large, brightly coloured, healthy, and vigorous males). In other words, do swordtail females really prefer sworded males per se or are they attracted to any males capable of growing brightly coloured and exaggerated tails? Recent evidence suggests the latter.

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