Abstract
Foraging behaviours encompass strategies to locate resources and to
exploit them. In many taxa these behaviours are controlled by a major
gene called for, but mechanisms vary between species. In the parasitoid
wasp Venturia canescens, sexual and asexual populations coexist in
sympatry but differ in their foraging behaviours. Here we explored the
molecular bases underpinning this divergence in foraging behaviours by
testing two mutually non-exclusive hypotheses: firstly the divergence in
the for gene results in difference in foraging strategies, and second
this latter is due to a divergence in whole-genome expression. Using
comparative genomics, we showed that the for gene was conserved across
insects considering both sequence as well as gene model complexity.
Polymorphism analysis did not support the occurrence of two allelic
variants diverging across the two populations, yet asexual population
exhibited less polymorphism compared to the sexual one. Sexual and
asexual transcriptomes sharply split up, with 10.9% of differentially
expressed genes, but these were not enriched in behavioural related
genes. We showed that the for gene was more expressed in asexual female
heads than in sexual ones, and that asexuals were the ones that explored
more the environment and exploited more host patches. Overall, these
results suggested that a fine tuning in the for gene expression between
populations may have led to distinct foraging behaviours. We
hypothesized that reproductive polymorphism and coexistence in sympatry
of sexual and asexual populations specialized to different ecological
niches via divergent optima on phenotypic traits, could imply adaptation
through different expression patterns of the for gene and at many other
loci throughout the genome.