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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on July 30, 2008
Behavioral Ecology 2008 19(6):1343-1350; doi:10.1093/beheco/arn068
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Females affect sperm swimming performance: a field experiment with barn swallows Hirundo rustica

A. P. Møllera, T. A. Mousseaub and G. Rudolfsenc

a Laboratoire de Parasitologie Evolutive, CNRS UMR 7103, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Bât. A, 7ème étage, 7 quai St. Bernard, Case 237, F-75252 Paris, Cedex 05, France b Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA c Department of Biology, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway

Address correspondence to A.P. Møller. E-mail: amoller{at}snv.jussieu.fr.


  Abstract

Sexual conflict over fertilization may in animals with internal fertilization initiate an evolutionary arms race that causes the female reproductive tract to become hostile to sperm performance if females with more selective reproductive tracts have their eggs fertilized by sperm of superior quality. This hypothesis suggests that sperm should perform better when tested in a physiologically neutral cell culture medium (neutral medium) than in the same "neutral medium" to which fluid derived from the female reproductive tract has been added (female medium). We tested this prediction using in vitro tests on sperm collected from barn swallows Hirundo rustica by recording sperm performance on video in neutral medium and "female medium." Sperm performance differed significantly among males but also between neutral and female medium. Sperm performed less well in female medium compared with neutral medium in terms of velocity. A principal component (PC) analysis of the 12 sperm parameters produced 4 PCs that explained 86% of the variance. The difference in the second and the third PC between neutral and female medium, reflecting sperm with a high degree of lateral head displacement and absence of straight and linear movement, many static sperm, and a small fraction of sperm with medium velocity, respectively, was positively related to an indicator of female quality: tail length. The latter result may suggest that high-quality females differentially affected the relative performance of sperm in their reproductive tract, consistent with the theory of sexual conflict.

Key words: sexual conflict, sexual selection, sperm, swimming performance.

Received 20 November 2007; revised 15 May 2008; accepted 20 May 2008.


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