Abstract
Female bioluminescent ostracods invest a large portion of their reproductive life span in caring for a single brood of offspring. In a mating system where the male:female operational sex ratio during courtship can reach 176:1, females have abundant opportunity to mate with multiple males. To test whether females of the bioluminescent ostracod Photeros annecohenae (Torres & Morin, 2007) are producing broods sired by more than one male, we use newly developed primers to amplify variable DNA microsatellite regions and quantify allelic variation within maternal broods. In four females and all offspring from broods of each female (N = 8–15), no single brood of offspring contained more than two paternal alleles, indicating that multiple paternity is not predominant in the population assayed. Multiple paternity has been suggested to occur in multiple ostracod lineages, but this is the first genetic assessment of paternity within Ostracoda.
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