Most D. recens females remate within a few days and use the sperm of multiple males to sire their offspring. We found that the proportion of females that produced both wild-type and dark-eyed offspring, indicative of multiple mating, increased with the number of days the flies were held together ( ? 5 2 = 27 , p < 0.0001), and that this was owing to a lower number of multiply mated females in the 1-day treatment (? 2 = 20, p < 0.0001; figure 3; electronic supplementary material, figure S7). Whether the wild-type eyed males in the cage were ST or SR did not affect this pattern ( ? 6 2 = 10 , p = 0.13). Using the occurrence of mixed broods is a conservative estimate of remating rate, as we cannot detect when females mate with males of the same eye colour genotype or mate twice but do not use the sperm of both malesbining SR and ST cages within each day, when flies are kept together for 24 h, 20% of females produced mixed broods, indicating they mated with both dark and wild-type males. This suggests that about 40% of females mated at least twice within 24 h, because we only detected half of the broods produced from double matings (95% CI 0.32–0.47). 66% mated at least twice) and increased to approximately 50% after 3 days, suggesting that all of the females had mated twice (figure 3).
If a lady mates twice and each mating is by using good haphazard men, half of the amount of time she’d be expected so you’re able to spouse having both dark and you will nuts-kind of men (and half of committed she’d lover which have a couple crazy-type of otherwise two ebony-eyed men)
Profile step 3. Paternity analyses regarding the spunk battle crate try out imply female lover proliferate. Revealed is the tiny fraction of females you to delivered one another dark and you will wild-types of offspring, proving they’d mated that have one another form of guys, separated of the quantity of months the latest flies were held together additionally the male tester genotype (SR otherwise ST). The brand new mistake pubs mean the fresh 95% binomial rely on period. (On the web adaptation within the colour.)
This type of research have information on how girls explore spunk. If the lady you to definitely lover more than double utilize the spunk regarding people boys equally, following most otherwise every girls is always to ultimately sire combined broods. For the reason that whenever a female mates multiply and you will uses the brand new spunk of all away from their mates just as, your chances that she supplies kids sired from the letter men away from a comparable sorts of = (1/2) (n?1) , where n is the amount of matings. Notably, that it number easily refuses in order to no since the n gets high. But not, i keep in mind that the brand new frequency of women generating mixed broods profile of up to 50% (profile step 3). This means that that energetic amount of friends this kind of girls try letter = dos and therefore females only use brand new sperm of the history one or two males they mated which have.
The fresh new ratio of women one to introduced combined broods increased to 33% once 2 days (approx
We find that couples seeking men classified ads in conditions of sperm competition, SR males sire fewer offspring than ST males. In cages where flies were kept together for 2, 3, 4 or 6 days, ST males sired a greater proportion of the offspring than SR males (each p < 0.05; figure 4). The fraction of offspring by SR versus ST males did not differ significantly in cages where flies were kept together for 1 or 10 days (each p > 0.05). In the cages where the flies were kept together for 1 day, the dark males sired more offspring regardless of the SR status of the tester wild-type males (figure 4); it is unclear why this is because our mating experiments described above found no preference of dark females for dark males. This effect goes away after day 1, where all of the cages with ST tester males have approximately 50% wild-type offspring, as expected if there was no preference for male eye colour.