Heritability of size study published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology!

Our new study on the heritability and phenotypic plasiticity of body size in a parthenogenetic wasp (Dinocampus coccinellae) is now published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology! Here we designed an experiment with parthenogenetic lines of D. coccinellae presented with three different host ladybeetle species of varying sizes, across multiple generations to investigate heritability, and plasticity of body size measured via a combination of morphometric variables such as thorax width, abdominal width, and wing length in D. coccinellae. Our results indicate (1) little heritable variation in body size, (2) strong independence of offspring size on the host environment, (3) small mothers produce larger offspring, and vice versa, independent of host. We then model the evolution of size and host-shifting under a constrained fecundity advantage model of Cope’s Law using a Hidden Markov Model, showing that D. coccinellae likely has fitness advantages to maintain plasticity in body size despite parthenogenetic reproduction.

This work has been many years in the making, with all the reciprocal transplant experiments performed out of Alicia Tovar's garage through a year and a half of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A massive thank you and congratulations to everyone involved!