Temperature drives pre-reproductive selection and shapes the biogeography of a female polymorphism

Conflicts of interests between males and females over reproduction is a universal feature of sexually reproducing organisms and has driven the evolution of intersexual mimicry, mating behaviors and reproductive polymorphisms. Here we show how temperature drives pre-reproductive selection in a female colour polymorphic insect that is subject to strong sexual conflict. This species has three female colour morphs, one of which is a male mimic. This polymorphism is maintained by frequency-dependent sexual conflict caused by male mating harassment. The frequency of female morphs varies geographically, with higher frequency of the male mimic at higher latitudes. We show that differential temperature sensitivity of the female morphs and faster sexual maturation of the male mimic increases the frequency of this morph in the north. These results suggest that sexual conflict during the adult stage is shaped by abiotic factors and frequency-independent pre-reproductive selection that operate earlier during ontogeny of these female morphs.

Methods
This dataset has been collected in the field in various countries in Europe and in Sweden, where also mesocosm experiments were carried out, as well as pre-reproductive selection on female morphs was estimated in a series of populations outside Lund, province of Scania (Skåne) as described in the Metods-section of our paper. Our dataset contains both rawdata-files and code (R-scripts) that should make it possible to re-run our statistical analyses and re-generate our graphs.