Abstract
BackgroundMales and females often have opposing strategies for increasing fitness. Males that out-compete others will acquire more mating opportunities and thus have higher lifetime reproductive success. Females that mate with a high quality male receive either direct benefits through productivity or acquisition of additional resources or indirect benefits through the increased fitness of offspring. These components may be in conflict: factors that increase offspring fitness may decrease a female’s productivity, and alleles that are beneficial in one sex may be detrimental in the opposite sex. Here, we use a multigenerational study with recently caught strains of Drosophila melanogaster to examine the relationship between parental, male offspring, and female offspring fitness when fitness is measured in a basal non-competitive environment.ResultsWe find synergy between parental and offspring lifetime reproductive success, indicating a lack of parent-offspring conflict, and a synergy between son and daughter reproductive success, indicating a lack of intersexual conflict. Interestingly, inbreeding significantly reduced the lifetime reproductive success of daughters, but did not have a significant effect on short-term productivity measures of daughters, sons or parents.ConclusionsIn wild-caught flies, there appears to be no parent-offspring conflict or intersexual conflict for loci influencing offspring production in a anon-competitive environment. Further, there may not be a biologically relevant selection pressure for avoidance of inbreeding depression in wild-type individuals of this short-lived species.
Highlights
Males and females often have opposing strategies for increasing fitness
Comparison of productivity timescales Productivity was measured as both the number of offspring produced in 7 days (7 day productivity) and the number of offspring produced over the entire female’s lifespan for the parental combinations and for the F1 daughters (Additional file 2: Table S3)
The regression of these two measures of productivity was previously shown to be positive and significant for parentals [39] and we find that it is significant for daughters (Table 1; R2 = 0.108, d.f. = 98, P = 0.0008), indicating concordance between 7 day productivity and lifetime reproductive success for these groups
Summary
Males and females often have opposing strategies for increasing fitness. Males that out-compete others will acquire more mating opportunities and have higher lifetime reproductive success. Females that mate with a high quality male receive either direct benefits through productivity or acquisition of additional resources or indirect benefits through the increased fitness of offspring. These components may be in conflict: factors that increase offspring fitness may decrease a female’s productivity, and alleles that are beneficial in one sex may be detrimental in the opposite sex. Males and females often have differing reproductive strategies to increase their reproductive success [1]. Males typically increase their fitness by competing and acquiring as many mating opportunities as possible. While there may be some advantages to females for polyandry [2,3,4], there are costs [5,6,7,8,9], and females may instead increase their fitness by mating selectively
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