MateSim: Monte Carlo simulation for the generation of mating tables

Abstract

In species with sexual reproduction, the mating pattern is a meaningful element for understanding evolutionary and speciation processes. Given a mating pool where individuals can encounter each other randomly, the individual mating preferences would define the matings frequencies in the population.However, in every mating process, we can distinguish two different steps. First, the process of pair formation which implies that an encounter between partners must occur.Second, the actual mating once the encounter has occurred.Yet, we cannot always assume that the observed population patterns accurately reflect the individual's preferences. In some scenarios the individuals may have difficulties to achieve their mating preferences, such as in monogamous species with low population size, where the mating process is similar to a sampling without replacement. In the latter, the encounter process will introduce some noise that may disconnect the expected individual preferences from the obtained mating pattern.Actually, the difference between the mating pattern observed in a population and the mating preferences of the individuals have been shown by different modeling scenarios.Here I present a program that simulates the mating process for both discrete and continuous traits, under different encounter models and individual preferences, including effects as drift, time dependence and aging. The utility of the software is demonstrated by replicating and extending, a recent study that showed how patterns of positive assortative mating, or marriage in human societies, may arise from nonassortative individual preferences. The previous result is confirmed and it is caused by the marriage among the "ugliest" and oldest individuals, who after many attempts were . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/239178 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Dec. 24, 2017; 3 finally able to mate among themselves. In fact, by introducing an aging process, I show how the assortative pattern vanishes provided that there is not assortative individual preference.The software MateSim is available jointly with the user's manual, at