For example, it may pay a male to have a long penis that enables him to place his semen at an optimal AZD2281 chemical structure location within the female tract for fertilization. If females rely on post-copulatory events to determine which of several males fertilize her eggs, it will pay her to evolve traits that allow her to regain some control over paternity. In other words, under certain circumstances, we expect the co-evolution of male and female traits. Such sexual conflict appears to occur in male and female seed beetles Callosobruchus maculatus. The male has a large spine-covered penis that punctures the female tract during copulation. This ‘copulatory damage’ may be a male strategy to deter the female from remating,
thereby ensuring that the female’s eggs are fertilized by that male
(Crudgington & Siva-Jothy, 2000). There is some evidence that females of Callobruchus species whose males have a spiky penis have a thicker oviduct wall, selleck screening library than those without a spiky penis, suggesting correlated evolution between these two traits (Röon, Katvala & Arnqvist, 2007). A better-documented example of male–female coevolution involves the relative size of sperm and the size of female sperm storage structures across a range of taxa including featherwing beetles, stalk-eyed flies, fruitflies, moths and dungflies and birds (see Pitnick, Wolfner & Suarez, 2009). That this correlation is due to coevolution has been elegantly demonstrated in D. melanogaster by Miller & Pitnick (2002) using an experimental evolution approach. By conducting sperm competition studies between males with relatively long or short sperm using females with relatively long or short sperm storage structures (sperm receptacles), these authors showed that the outcome of sperm competition was determined by an interaction between sperm length and receptacle length, and that males with relatively long sperm were more successful in females with a longer sperm receptacle. Another example involves waterfowl, renowned for their forced extra-pair copulation behaviour (McKinney, Derrickson & Mineau, 1983). Most ducks are socially monogamous, but
the male plays little or no part PtdIns(3,4)P2 in incubation or rearing the offspring. In some species, the sex ratio is male biased because of differential predation, and during the breeding season, the operational sex ratio (the ratio of sexually active males to fertilizable females: Emlen & Oring, 1977) is extremely male biased. Possibly, as a result, in many waterfowl species, forced extra-pair copulations are common, and can even result in the death of females, and so this is a costly activity for females (Huxley, 1912). Wildfowl are unusual among birds in that the male has a penis, and this may facilitate forced extra-pair copulations (see Montgomerie & Briskie, 2007). The waterfowl phallus is a remarkable structure; inactive, it lies coiled, inside out within a pouch inside the male’s cloaca.
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