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Cascading indirect genetic effects in a clonal vertebrate

View ORCID ProfileAmber M. Makowicz, David Bierbach, Christian Richardson, Kimberly A. Hughes
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.27.433187
Amber M. Makowicz
1Department of Biological Sciences, Florida State University, 319 Stadium Drive, Tallahassee, FL 32304
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  • For correspondence: amakowicz@fsu.edu
David Bierbach
2Department of Biology and Ecology of Fishes, Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Müggelseedamm 310, 12587 Berlin, Germany
3Excellence Cluster ‘Science of Intelligence,’ Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
4Faculty of Life Sciences, Thaer-Institute, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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Christian Richardson
1Department of Biological Sciences, Florida State University, 319 Stadium Drive, Tallahassee, FL 32304
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Kimberly A. Hughes
1Department of Biological Sciences, Florida State University, 319 Stadium Drive, Tallahassee, FL 32304
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Abstract

Understanding how individual differences among organisms arise and how their effects propagate through groups of interacting individuals are fundamental questions in biology.Individual differences can arise from genetically-based variation in the conspecifics with which an individual interacts, and these effects might then be propagated to other individuals. Using a clonal species, the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa), we test the hypothesis that such indirect genetic effects (IGE) propagate beyond individuals that experience them firsthand. We tested this hypothesis by exposing genetically identical Amazon mollies to social partners of different genotypes, and then moving these individuals to new social groups in which they were the only member to have experienced the IGE. We found that genetically different social environments induced different levels of aggression experienced by the focal animals, and that these genetically-based social effects carried over into new social groups to influence the behavior of individuals that did not directly experience the previous social environments. Our data reveal that IGE can cascade beyond the individuals that directly experience them to influence phenotypes even when there is no genetically-based variation present within interacting groups. Theoretical and empirical expansion of the quantitative genetic framework developed for IGE to include cascading and other types of carry-over effects will improve understanding of social behavior and its evolution.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Data archiving All data will be archived in Figshare upon acceptance.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted November 07, 2021.
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Cascading indirect genetic effects in a clonal vertebrate
Amber M. Makowicz, David Bierbach, Christian Richardson, Kimberly A. Hughes
bioRxiv 2021.02.27.433187; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.27.433187
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Cascading indirect genetic effects in a clonal vertebrate
Amber M. Makowicz, David Bierbach, Christian Richardson, Kimberly A. Hughes
bioRxiv 2021.02.27.433187; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.27.433187

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