EvoLunch Seminar: Jessica Abbott (Lund University)

Following up on a previous experiment, my group has carried out an experiment restricting the inheritance of the X chromosome to the male line for many generations in Drosophila melanogaster. We expected this to lead to increased male fitness in the evolved lines, and a correlated masculinization of females who experimentally inherited an evolved X. Surprisingly, the changes we detected in the evolved lines suggest no correlation between the sexes for competitive fitness, but that sexual dimorphism in body size has increased. I will discuss these results in the light of sexual conflict theory.