Accounting for genetic differences among unknown parents in microevolutionary studies : how to include genetic groups in quantitative genetic animal models

This work was funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant to JMR. We thank Loeske Kruuk, Karin Meyer, Michael Morrissey, Simon Evans, Jarrod Hadfield and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and insights.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Is Pairing with a Relative Heritable? : Estimating Female and Male Genetic Contributions to the Degree of Biparental Inbreeding in Song Sparrows (Melospiza melodia)

Acknowledgments We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nation bands for access to Mandarte, P. Arcese and everyone who contributed to the long‐term data collection, and the European Research Council and Royal Society for funding. We thank P. Bijma, J. D. Hadfield, L. F. Keller, and E. Postma for illuminating discussions. In addition, R. Bonduriansky, L. E. B. Kruuk, and an anonymous reviewer provided insightful comments that improved the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Individual repeatability and heritability of divorce in a wild population

Funding All authors were supported by a European Research Council grant to JMR. Fieldwork was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the University of British Columbia. Acknowledgments We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nation bands for access to Mandarte, Peter Arcese, Lukas Keller, Pirmin Nietlisbach, and the University of Aberdeen Maxwell High Performance Computing cluster.Peer reviewedPostprin

Consistent Nest Site Selection by Turtles Across Habitats With Varying Levels of Human Disturbance

Human disturbance impacts the breeding behavior of many species, and it is particularly important to understand how these human-caused changes affect vulnerable taxa, such as turtles. Habitat alteration can change the amount and quality of suitable nesting habitat, while human presence during nesting may influence nesting behavior. Consequently, both habitat alteration and human presence can influence the microhabitat that females choose for nesting. In the summer of 2019, we located emydid turtle nests in east-central Alabama, USA, in areas with varying levels of human disturbance (high, intermediate, low). We aimed to determine whether turtles selected nest sites based on a range of microhabitat variables comparing maternally selected natural nests to randomly chosen artificial nests. We also compared nest site choice across areas with different levels of human disturbance. Natural nests had less variance in canopy openness and average daily mean and minimum temperature than artificial nests, but microhabitat variables were similar across differing levels of disturbance. Additionally, we experimentally quantified nest predation across a natural to human-disturbed gradient. Nest predation rates were higher in areas with low and intermediate levels of disturbance than in areas with high human disturbance. Overall, these results show that turtles are not adjusting their choices of nest microhabitat when faced with anthropogenic change, suggesting that preserving certain natural microhabitat features will be critical for populations in human-disturbed areas

Quantifying inbreeding avoidance through extra-pair reproduction

© 2014 The Author(s). Evolution © 2014 The Society for the Study of Evolution.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Sex-specific additive genetic variances and correlations for fitness in a song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) population subject to natural immigration and inbreeding

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nation bands for access to Mandarte and everyone who contributed to the long-term data collection. We thank the European Research Council for funding and the University of Aberdeen for generous access to the Maxwell High Performance Computing cluster. Pierre de Villemereuil, Michael B. Morrissey, and Jarrod D. Hadfield provided enlightening discussions during manuscript preparation. Joel McGlothlin and two anonymous reviewers provided further helpful comments. DATA ARCHIVING Data have been archived in the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p7p1jb3 (Wolak et al. 2018).Peer reviewedPostprintPostprintPublisher PD

A NARRATIVE IN RELIEF The Historiography of English Modern Painting (1910-1915), from the 1910s to the 1950s

The groups of painters in England who experimented with new visual expressions of modernity between 1910 and 1915 are the subject of this historiographical research. More precisely, the accounts of Vorticism, Bloomsbury post-Impressionism and the modern art of painters associated with Sickert, (principally the Camden Town Group), have been critically examined over a forty year period in order to trace the narrative of their place in contemporary art criticism and their entry into histories of what soon became the recent past. This textually-based methodology has produced an insight into the forces acting upon the critical reception of a particular period subsequently seen by historians as a discrete phase in the evolution of British art. The readings of texts are organised chronologically so as to illustrate the formation of a historical narrative and its variants, and to show how immediate responses and retrospective evaluations connect discursively. The findings of the research have four aspects. Firstly, it has been fruitful to isolate the narrative of the years 1910-15 over forty years so as to test whether it is possible, using this longitudinal methodology, to comment productively on the integrity of this historical episode, and to establish how the narrative became a critical orthodoxy governed by a limited range of analytical perspectives. Secondly, estimations as to the quality of the art produced in these years developed a distinct, often negative, patterning in journalism and art historical writing and this is also traced in some detail over time. Dominant tropes in the critical language have been identified over this forty year period which became the default positions of historical analysis and which, I argue, impeded sophisticated or revisionist thinking. With a few notable exceptions, the analysis of early English modern art is poorly served by its commentators in this period and this weakened discursive health. Thirdly, this thesis also considers the nature and influence of, periodicals, newspapers, 'little magazines' and the genres of art-writing that were extant between 1910 and 1956 and relates this to the distinctions and similarities between art criticism and art history at this time. A fourth analytic strand concerns outside influences on the production of critical and historical texts. lt explores the impact of promotional art writing, and exposes the professional pressures on, and rivalries between, writers and considers some of the wider political circumstances through which this particular debate on recent art was refracted

Demographic mechanisms of inbreeding adjustment through extra-pair reproduction

One hypothesis explaining extra-pair reproduction is that socially monogamous females mate with extra-pair males to adjust the coefficient of inbreeding (ƒ) of extra-pair offspring (EPO) relative to that of within-pair offspring (WPO) they would produce with their socially paired male. Such adjustment of offspring ƒrequires non-random extra-pair reproduction with respect to relatedness, which is in turn often assumed to require some mechanism of explicit pre-copulatory or post-copulatory kin discrimination.  We propose three demographic processes that could potentially cause mean ƒ to differ between individual females' EPO and WPO given random extra-pair reproduction with available males without necessarily requiring explicit kin discrimination. Specifically, such a difference could arise if social pairings formed non-randomly with respect to relatedness or persisted non-randomly with respect to relatedness, or if the distribution of relatedness between females and their sets of potential mates changed during the period through which social pairings persisted.  We used comprehensive pedigree and pairing data from free-living song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) to quantify these three processes and hence investigate how individual females could adjust mean offspring ƒ through instantaneously random extra-pair reproduction.  Female song sparrows tended to form social pairings with unrelated or distantly related males slightly less frequently than expected given random pairing within the defined set of available males. Furthermore, social pairings between more closely related mates tended to be more likely to persist across years than social pairings between less closely related mates. However, these effects were small and the mean relatedness between females and their sets of potential extra-pair males did not change substantially across the years through which social pairings persisted.  Our framework and analyses illustrate how demographic and social structuring within populations might allow females to adjust mean ƒ of offspring through random extra-pair reproduction without necessarily requiring explicit kin discrimination, implying that adjustment of offspring f might be an inevitable consequence of extra-pair reproduction. New theoretical and empirical studies are required to explore the general magnitude of such effects and quantify the degree to which they could facilitate or constrain long-term evolution of extra-pair reproduction

Immigration counter-acts local micro-evolution of a major fitness component : migration-selection balance in free-living song sparrows

Acknowledgements: We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nations Bands for allowing access to Mandarte, everyone who contributed to long-term data collection, NSERC (Canada), the Swiss National Science Foundation (recently P400PB-180870), the Research Council of Norway (SFF-III, project 223257) and NTNU for funding. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Variation in parent-offspring kinship in socially monogamous systems with extra-pair reproduction and inbreeding

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nations bands for allowing access to Mandarte; everyone who contributed to long-term data collection; Lukas Keller and Ryan Germain for helpful discussions; and the European Research Council, UK Royal Society, National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Swiss National Science Foundation for their invaluable support. DATA ARCHIVING Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4r383.Peer reviewedPublisher PD