Abstract
Inbreeding depression, i.e., the reduction of health and vigour in
individuals with high inbreeding coefficients, is expected to increase
with environmental, social, or physiological stress. Differences in the
strength of sexual selection are therefore predicted to usually lead to
higher inbreeding depression in males than in females. However,
sex-specific differences in life history may reverse that pattern during
certain developmental stages. In salmonids, for example, female
juveniles start developing their gonads earlier than males who instead
grow faster during that time. We tested whether the sexes are
differently affected by inbreeding during that time. To study the
effects of inbreeding coefficients that may be typical for natural
populations of brown trout (Salmo trutta), and also to control for
potentially confounding maternal or paternal effects, we sampled males
and females from the wild, used their gametes in a block-wise breeding
design to produce 60 full-sib families, released the offspring as
yolk-sac larvae into the wild, caught them back 6 months later,
identified their genetic sex, and used microsatellites to assign them to
their parents. We calculated the average inbreeding coefficient per
family based on a panel of >1 million SNPs. Juvenile growth
could be predicted from these inbreeding coefficients and the genetic
sex: Females grew slower with increasing inbreeding coefficient, while
no such link could be found in males. This sex-specific inbreeding
depression led to the overall pattern that females grew on average
slower than males during the time of gonad formation.