Conspecific sperm precedence in Drosophila

Catherine S. C. Price ()
Additional contact information
Catherine S. C. Price: University of Chicago

Nature, 1997, vol. 388, issue 6643, 663-666

Abstract: Abstract Traits that influence the interactions between males and females can evolve very rapidly through sexual selection1 or sexually antagonistic coevolution2. Rapid change in the fertilization systems of independent populations can give rise to reproductive incompatibilities between populations3,4, and may contribute to speciation5. Here I provide evidence for cryptic reproductive divergence among three sibling species of Drosophila that leads to a form of postmating isolation. When a female mates with both a conspecific and a heterospecific male, the conspecific sperm fertilize the vast majority of the eggs, regardless of the order of the matings. Heterospecific sperm fertilize fewer eggs after these double matings than after single matings. Experiments using spermless males show that the seminal fluid of the conspecific male is largely responsible for this conspecific sperm precedence. Moreover, when two males of the same species mate sequentially with a female from a different species, a highly variable pattern of sperm precedence replaces the second-male sperm precedence that is consistently found within species. These results indicate that females mediate sperm competition, and that second-male sperm precedence is not an automatic consequence of the mechanics of sperm storage.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/41753 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:388:y:1997:i:6643:d:10.1038_41753

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/41753

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().