Regina Vega-Trejo with a net she used during her doctoral studies on the effects of inbreeding in mosquitofish.
SHARYN WRAGG RSB, THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Biologists have long believed that it’s adaptive for most species to avoid mate pairings between close kin because of the potential genetic fallout, but a meta-analysis published May 3 in Nature Ecology & Evolution challenges this long-held assumption.
The authors examined nearly 140 experimental studies of inbreeding avoidance conducted on 88 species—everything from fruit flies to humans—and found little evidence that animals on the whole prefer non-relatives.
The inclusion criteria limited the analysis to explicit studies of mate choice, notes Regina Vega-Trejo, an evolutionary biologist at Stockholm University in Sweden and a coauthor of the new paper. Although in the wild, numerous mechanisms can interfere with those choices—such as living in a large, intermingled population where the odds of pairing up with kin are low—the results ...
