{"doi":"10.1093/evlett/qrac002","title":"Male harm suppresses female fitness, affecting the dynamics of adaptation and evolutionary rescue","abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>\n               <jats:p>One of the most pressing questions we face as biologists is to understand how climate change will affect the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations and how these dynamics will in turn affect population recovery. Increasing evidence shows that sexual selection favors population viability and local adaptation. However, sexual selection can also foster sexual conflict and drive the evolution of male harm to females. Male harm is extraordinarily widespread and has the potential to suppress female fitness and compromise population growth, yet we currently ignore its net effects across taxa or its influence on local adaptation and evolutionary rescue. We conducted a comparative meta-analysis to quantify the impact of male harm on female fitness and found an overall negative effect of male harm on female fitness. Negative effects seem to depend on proxies of sexual selection, increasing inversely to the female relative size and in species with strong sperm competition. We then developed theoretical models to explore how male harm affects adaptation and evolutionary rescue. We show that, when sexual conflict depends on local adaptation, population decline is reduced, but at the cost of slowing down genetic adaptation. This trade-off suggests that eco-evolutionary feedback on sexual conflict can act like a double-edged sword, reducing extinction risk by buffering the demographic costs of climate change, but delaying genetic adaptation. However, variation in the mating system and male harm type can mitigate this trade-off. Our work shows that male harm has widespread negative effects on female fitness and productivity, identifies potential mechanistic factors underlying variability in such costs across taxa, and underscores how acknowledging the condition-dependence of male harm may be important to understand the demographic and evolutionary processes that impact how species adapt to environmental change.</jats:p>","journal":"Evolution Letters","year":2024,"id":654636,"datarank":0.4887144807032224,"base_score":3.258096538021482,"endowment":3.258096538021482,"self_citation_contribution":0.4887144807032224,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.4887144807032224,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":25,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":null,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":null,"fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1708515,"name":"Gonçalo S Faria","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1708516,"name":"Roberto García-Roa","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1708517,"name":"Daniel W A Noble","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1371666,"name":"Pau Carazo","orcid":"0000-0002-1525-6522","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1708513,"name":"Miguel Gómez-Llano","orcid":"0000-0003-2714-2925","position":0,"is_corresponding":false}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":{"has_enrichment":true,"resolved":true,"title":"Male harm suppresses female fitness, affecting the dynamics of adaptation and evolutionary rescue","abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>\n               <jats:p>One of the most pressing questions we face as biologists is to understand how climate change will affect the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations and how these dynamics will in turn affect population recovery. Increasing evidence shows that sexual selection favors population viability and local adaptation. However, sexual selection can also foster sexual conflict and drive the evolution of male harm to females. Male harm is extraordinarily widespread and has the potential to suppress female fitness and compromise population growth, yet we currently ignore its net effects across taxa or its influence on local adaptation and evolutionary rescue. We conducted a comparative meta-analysis to quantify the impact of male harm on female fitness and found an overall negative effect of male harm on female fitness. Negative effects seem to depend on proxies of sexual selection, increasing inversely to the female relative size and in species with strong sperm competition. We then developed theoretical models to explore how male harm affects adaptation and evolutionary rescue. We show that, when sexual conflict depends on local adaptation, population decline is reduced, but at the cost of slowing down genetic adaptation. This trade-off suggests that eco-evolutionary feedback on sexual conflict can act like a double-edged sword, reducing extinction risk by buffering the demographic costs of climate change, but delaying genetic adaptation. However, variation in the mating system and male harm type can mitigate this trade-off. Our work shows that male harm has widespread negative effects on female fitness and productivity, identifies potential mechanistic factors underlying variability in such costs across taxa, and underscores how acknowledging the condition-dependence of male harm may be important to understand the demographic and evolutionary processes that impact how species adapt to environmental change.</jats:p>","is_dataset_classified":null,"base_score":3.258096538021482,"endowment":3.258096538021482,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"views":0,"has_version_chain":false,"is_dataset":false,"is_oa":false,"pmid":"38370549","pmcid":"PMC10871930","openalex_id":"https://openalex.org/W4389830240","authors":[],"funders":[{"funder_name":"National Science Foundation","grant_id":"1748945","title":"CAREER:  A role for local adaptation in shaping species coexistence mechanisms"}],"total_grants":1,"fwci":11.7908,"citation_percentile":0.98596762,"influential_citations":0,"citation_trend":[{"year":2023,"count":3},{"year":2024,"count":6},{"year":2025,"count":9},{"year":2026,"count":7}],"oa_status":"gold","license":"cc-by-nc","oa_locations":[{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evlett/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/evlett/qrac002/54532649/qrac002.pdf","host_type":"journal"},{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evlett/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/evlett/qrac002/54532649/qrac002.pdf","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evlett/article-pdf/8/1/149/56675598/qrac002.pdf","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrac002","host_type":"journal"},{"url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38370549","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/10871930","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://hdl.handle.net/10550/104685","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-94656","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/04463b4a-b624-4e03-b720-4d93154aa5dd","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733716107","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10871930/pdf/qrac002.pdf","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://roderic.uv.es/bitstreams/4c74dde5-f2dd-4e4d-8c98-fb48e6cfe055/download","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC10871930","host_type":"Europe_PMC"},{"url":"https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC10871930?pdf=render","host_type":"Europe_PMC"},{"url":"http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrac002","host_type":""}],"fields_of_study":["Plant and animal studies","Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior","Animal Behavior and Reproduction","0106 biological sciences","01 natural sciences"],"mesh_terms":[],"keywords":["Sexual conflict","Harm","Population","Local adaptation","Sexual selection","Biology","Experimental evolution","Adaptation (eye)","Extinction (optical mineralogy)","Ecology","Demography","Psychology","Social psychology","Evolutionary Rescue","Ekologi","Evolutionary Biology","The Importance of Interactions Among Organisms","evolució (biologia)","Evolutionsbiologi"],"sdg_mappings":[{"sdg_number":5,"sdg_label":"5. Gender equality"},{"sdg_number":13,"sdg_label":"13. Climate action"},{"sdg_number":15,"sdg_label":"15. Life on land"},{"sdg_number":0,"sdg_label":"Climate action"}],"linked_datasets":[],"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"database_accessions":[],"source":"live","citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-08-11T07:36:25.634043Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}