Stronger interspecific sexual differences may be favored when females search for mates in the presence of congeners

Why are some species sexually dimorphic while other closely related species are not? While all females in genus Strauzia share a multiply-banded wing pattern typical of many other true fruit flies, males of four species have noticeably elongated wings with banding patterns “coalesced” into a continuous dark streak across much of the wing. We take an integrative phylogenetic approach to explore the evolution of this dimorphism and develop general hypotheses underlying the evolution of wing dimorphism in flies. We find that the origin of coalesced and other darkened male wing patterns correlate with the inferred origin of host plant sharing in Strauzia. While wing shape among non-host-sharing species tended to be conserved across the phylogeny, shapes of male wings for Strauzia species sharing the same host plant were more different from one another than expected under Brownian models of evolution and overall rates of wing shape change differed between non-host-sharing species and host-sharing species. A survey of North American Tephritidae finds just three other genera with specialist species that share host plants. Host-sharing species in these genera also have wing patterns unusual for each genus. Only genus Eutreta is like Strauzia in having the unusual wing patterns only in males, and of genera that have multiple species sharing hosts, only in Eutreta and Strauzia do males hold territories while females search for mates. We hypothesize that in species that share host plants, those where females actively search for males in the presence of congeners may be more likely to evolve sexually dimorphic wing patterns.