Data from: Estimating encounter rates as the first step of sexual selection in the lizard Anolis sagrei

How individuals move through their environment dictates which other
individuals they encounter, determining their social and reproductive
interactions and the extent to which they experience sexual selection.
Specifically, females rarely have the option of mating with all males in a
population—they can only choose among the males they encounter. Further,
quantifying phenotypic differences between the males that females
encounter and those that sire females’ offspring lends insight into how
social and reproductive interactions shape male phenotypes. We used an
explicitly spatiotemporal Markov chain model to estimate the number of
potential mates of Anolis sagrei lizards from their movement behavior, and
used genetic paternity assignments to quantify sexual selection on males.
Females frequently encountered and mated with multiple males, offering
ample opportunity for female mate choice. Sexual selection favored males
that were bigger and moved over larger areas, though the effect of body
size cannot be disentangled from last-male precedence. Our approach
corroborates some patterns of sexual selection previously hypothesized in
anoles based on describing them as territorial, whereas other results,
including female multiple mating itself, are at odds with territorial
polygyny, offering insight into discrepancies in other taxa between
behavioral and genetic descriptions of mating systems.

个体在环境中的移动方式决定了它们会遇到哪些其他个体，进而影响其社会与繁殖互动，以及它们经历性选择的程度。具体而言，雌性很少有机会与种群中的所有雄性交配——它们只能在遇到的雄性中进行选择。此外，量化雌性遇到的雄性与最终成为其后代父亲的雄性之间的表型差异，有助于深入理解社会与繁殖互动如何塑造雄性表型。我们使用明确的时空马尔可夫链模型，根据安乐蜥（Anolis sagrei）的移动行为估算其潜在配偶数量，并通过遗传父权分配量化雄性所承受的性选择压力。雌性频繁遇到并与多个雄性交配，为雌性的配偶选择提供了充足机会。性选择偏好体型更大且活动范围更广的雄性，尽管体型的影响无法与最后雄性优先效应区分开来。我们的方法证实了此前基于安乐蜥领域性描述所假设的一些性选择模式，而包括雌性多配在内的其他结果则与领域性一雄多雌制相悖，为理解其他类群中交配系统的行为描述与遗传描述之间的差异提供了见解。