Female reproductive tract form drives the evolution of complex sperm morphology.

ABSTRACT: The coevolution of female mate preferences and exaggerated male traits is a fundamental prediction of many sexual selection models, but has largely defied testing due to the challenges of quantifying the sensory and cognitive bases of female preferences. We overcome this difficulty by focusing on postcopulatory sexual selection, where readily quantifiable female reproductive tract structures are capable of biasing paternity in favor of preferred sperm morphologies and thus represent a proximate mechanism of female mate choice when ejaculates from multiple males overlap within the tract. Here, we use phylogenetically controlled generalized least squares and logistic regression to test whether the evolution of female reproductive tract design might have driven the evolution of complex, multi

SUBMITTER: Higginson DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3311347 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature