THE EVOLUTION OF FEMALE‐BIASED SEXUAL SIZE DIMORPHISM: A POPULATION‐LEVEL COMPARATIVE STUDY IN HORNED LIZARDS ( PHRYNOSOMA )

Female‐biased sexual size dimorphism is uncommon among vertebrates and traditionally has been attributed to asymmetric selective pressures favoring large fecund females (the fecundity‐advantage hypothesis) and/or small mobile males (the small‐male advantage hypothesis). I use a phylogenetically based comparative method to address these hypotheses for the evolution and maintenance of sexual size dimorphism among populations of three closely related lizard species ( Phrynosoma douglasi, P. ditmarsi , and P. hernandezi ). With independent contrasts I estimate evolutionary correlations among female body size, male body size, and sexual size dimorphism (SSD) to determine whether males have become small, females have become large, or both sexes have diverged concurrently in body size during the evolutionary Xhistory of this group. Population differences in degree of SSD are inversely correlated with average male body size, but are not correlated with average female body size. Thus, variation in SSD among populations has occurred predominantly through changes in male size, suggesting that selective pressures on small males may affect degree of SSD in this group. I explore three possible evolutionary mechanisms by which the mean male body size in a population could evolve: changes in size at maturity, changes in the variance of male body sizes, and changes in skewness of male body size distributions. Comparative analyses indicate that population differentiation in male body size is achieved by changes in male size at maturity, without changes in the variance or skewness of male and female size distributions. This study demonstrates the potential of comparative methods at lower taxonomic levels (among populations and closely related species) for studying microevolutionary processes that underlie population differentiation.