The evolutionary genetics of acquisition and allocation in the wing dimorphic cricket, Gryllus firmus.

The evolutionary trajectories of trade-offs are ultimately governed by the evolution of the underlying physiological processes of the acquisition and subsequent allocation of resources. In this study, we focused directly on acquisition and allocation as traits and estimated their genetic architecture in the trade-off between flight capability and reproduction in the cricket, Gryllus firmus. To determine the evolutionary genetics of acquisition and allocation both within and between resource environments we performed a large-scale quantitative genetic breeding experiment in which families were split over several resource levels. Our findings were fourfold: 1) there was substantial genetic variance in acquisition and allocation; 2) contrary to the assumption of independence between acquisition and allocation, there was a significant genetic correlation between them; 3) the genetic covariance between acquisition and allocation was significantly different in the different food environmen...