Sexual selection reinforces a higher flight endurance in urban damselflies

Urbanisation is among the most important and globally rapidly increasing anthropogenic processes, and is known to drive rapid evolution. Habitats in urbanised areas typically consist of small, fragmented and isolated patches, which is expected to select for a better locomotor performance, along with its underlying morphological traits. This, in turn, is expected to cause differentiation in selection regimes, as populations with different frequency distributions for a given trait will span different parts of the species’ fitness function. Yet, very few studies considered differentiation in phenotypic traits associated with patterns in habitat fragmentation and isolation along urbanisation gradients, and none considered differentiation in sexual selection regimes. We investigated differentiation in flight performance and flight-related traits, and sexual selection on these traits across replicated urban and rural populations of the scrambling damselfly Coenagrion puella. To disentangle di...