Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 7, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.192126
Keywords
mating types; self-incompatibility; balancing selection; isogamy; negative frequency-dependent selection
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society
- Leverhulme Trust
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Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating types. A long-standing open question in evolutionary biology is: what governs the number of these mating types across species? Simple theoretical arguments imply an advantage to rare types, suggesting the number of types should grow consistently; however, empirical observations are very different. While some isogamous species exhibit thousands of mating types, such species are exceedingly rare, and most have fewer than 10. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis to quantify the role of fitness variation-characterized by different mortality rates-in determining the number of mating types emerging in simple evolutionary models. We predict that the number of mating types decreases as the variance of mortality increases.
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