Editorial: Sexual selection and environmental change: what do we know and what comes next?

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Anthropogenic environmental change is the most significant threat to biodiversity in the 21st century. Animal populations are experiencing rapid changes in their biotic and abiotic environment, which impose novel selection pressures on organisms and increase the risk of population extinction. There is thus a pressing need to understand what affects the capacity of populations to respond and adapt to environmental change. Because behavioral traits are very labile, they provide a means of rapidly responding to environmental change (Sih et al. 2011; Tuomainen and Candolin 2011). Mating behavior, in particular, could be especially important given its role in shaping individual reproductive success and population dynamics. Accordingly, in recent years, there has been increasing interest in how sexual selection may influence a population’s ability to cope with environmental change. The 2 main mechanisms of sexual selection are competition for access to mates (intra-sexual selection) and choice of a mating partner (intersexual selection). It has been suggested that stronger mating preferences for “good genes” could lead to higher quality offspring (Martinossi-Allibert et al. 2019). Indeed, a number of recent studies have shown that strong sexual selection can increase population resilience and reduce the risk of extinction (Cally et al. 2019; Godwin et al. 2020; but see Candolin and Heuschele 2008). Sexual selection could therefore potentially improve a population’s ability to cope with environmental change. Yet, changes in environmental conditions may also alter the strength or direction of sexual selection, thereby leading to complex interactions and eco-evolutionary feedback loops between environmental change and sexual selection (Figure 1; Alpedrinha et al. 2019). Here, we discuss current empirical and theoretical work on 1) the effects of environmental change on sexual selection and 2) the role of sexual selection in adaptation to environmental change. We then highlight 7 new articles on this topic, published in this special column of Current Zoology. We end by identifying some of the major gaps in our knowledge and offer suggestions for future research avenues in this area. Effects of Environmental Change on Sexual Selection