Publication Date:
2010-03-20
Description:
Our understanding of postcopulatory sexual selection has been constrained by an inability to discriminate competing sperm of different males, coupled with challenges of directly observing live sperm inside the female reproductive tract. Real-time and spatiotemporal analyses of sperm movement, storage, and use within female Drosophila melanogaster inseminated by two transgenic males with, respectively, green and red sperm heads allowed us to unambiguously discriminate among hypothesized mechanisms underlying sperm precedence, including physical displacement and incapacitation of "resident" sperm by second males, female ejection of sperm, and biased use of competing sperm for fertilization. We find that competitive male fertilization success derives from a multivariate process involving ejaculate-female and ejaculate-ejaculate interactions, as well as complex sperm behavior in vivo.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Manier, Mollie K -- Belote, John M -- Berben, Kirstin S -- Novikov, David -- Stuart, Will T -- Pitnick, Scott -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2010 Apr 16;328(5976):354-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1187096. Epub 2010 Mar 18.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Biology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1270, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20299550" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Animals, Genetically Modified
;
Copulation
;
Drosophila melanogaster/*physiology
;
Female
;
*Fertilization
;
Genitalia, Female/physiology
;
Green Fluorescent Proteins
;
Luminescent Proteins
;
Male
;
*Mating Preference, Animal
;
Sexual Behavior, Animal
;
Sperm Head
;
Sperm Motility
;
Spermatozoa/*physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink