SEXUAL selection is driving some fish towards extinction, say researchers
from New Mexico. They have found that female Pecos pupfish prefer to mate with
males of another species.
“It’s like seeing speciation in reverse,” says biologist Jonathan Rosenfield
at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. In freshwater fish, roughly 40
per cent of endangered species are at risk of hybridising with related exotic
species. But few studies have investigated the biological mechanisms that bring
about the genetic swamping and assimilation of one species by another.
Rosenfield and his colleague Astrid Kodric-Brown have found that sexual
selection—a process of non-random…
