Natural populations often experience the weakening or removal of a source of selection that
had been important in the maintenance of one or more traits. Here we refer to these …

Loss of traits can dramatically alter the fate of species. Evidence is rapidly accumulating that
the prevalence of trait loss is grossly underestimated. New findings demonstrate that traits …

Environmental shifts and life‐history changes may result in formerly adaptive traits becoming
non‐functional or maladaptive. In the absence of pleiotropy and other constraints, such traits …

Behavioural traits are often noted to persist after relaxation or removal of associated
selection pressure, whereas it has been observed that morphological traits under similar …

Environmental shifts and lifestyle changes may result in formerly adaptive traits becoming
non-functional or maladaptive. The subsequent decay of such traits highlights the …

Among insects, tympanal ears evolved at least 18 times, resulting in a diversity of auditory
systems. Insects use their ears in different behavioural contexts, mainly intraspecific …

Insect ears evolved many times independently. As a consequence, a striking diversity exists
in the location, construction and behavioural implementation of ears. In this review, we first …

How changes in selective regimes affect trait evolution is an important open biological
question. We take advantage of naturally occurring and repeated transitions from sexual to …

Parthenogenetic lineages are known to rapidly colonize large areas that become available
after glacial periods as parthenogenetic reproduction is beneficial over mating when the …

Sensory losses or reductions are frequently attributed to relaxed selection. However, anuran
species have lost tympanic middle ears many times, despite anurans' use of acoustic …