Data from: Sexual selection has minimal impact on effective population sizes in species with high rates of random offspring mortality: an empirical demonstration using fitness distributions

The effective population size (Ne) is a fundamental parameter in
population genetics that influences the rate of loss of genetic diversity.
Sexual selection has the potential to reduce Ne by causing the
sex-specific distributions of individuals that successfully reproduce to
diverge. To empirically estimate the effect of sexual selection on Ne, we
obtained fitness distributions for males and females from an outbred,
laboratory-adapted population of Drosophila melanogaster. We observed
strong sexual selection in this population (the variance in male
reproductive success was ∼14 times higher than that for females), but
found that sexual selection had only a modest effect on Ne, which was 75%
of the census size. This occurs because the substantial random offspring
mortality in this population diminishes the effects of sexual selection on
Ne, a result that necessarily applies to other high fecundity species. The
inclusion of this random offspring mortality creates a scaling effect that
reduces the variance/mean ratios for male and female reproductive success
and causes them to converge. Our results demonstrate that measuring
reproductive success without considering offspring mortality can
underestimate Ne and overestimate the genetic consequences of sexual
selection. Similarly, comparing genetic diversity among different genomic
components may fail to detect strong sexual selection.