Cross-generational comparison of reproductive success in recently caught strains of Drosophila melanogaster

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.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-017-0887-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

What happens to offspring when parents are inbred, old or had a poor start in life? Evidence for sex‐specific parental effects

“…It is worth noting that previous studies showing that parental inbreeding affects offspring phenotypes have mainly been on species with post‐natal parental care (e.g. Mattey et al ., ; Bérénos et al ., ; Huisman et al ., ; Pilakouta & Smiseth, ), although some studies have shown effects of parental inbreeding on offspring performance in insects lacking parental care such as Drosophila (see Tan et al ., ; Nguyen & Moehring, ).…”

Males from populations with higher competitive mating success produce sons with lower fitness

“…Although there may be sexual conflict between males and females when mating, there was a negative correlation between male mating success and the lifetime reproductive success of both sons and daughters and thus no evidence of sexual conflict in the fitness of the resulting offspring. A previous study in D. melanogaster measured lifetime reproductive success without the presence of female choice or social interaction, and also found no sexual conflict when comparing male and female productivity to the productivity of F 1 sons and F 1 daughters (Nguyen & Moehring, ). In contrast to the study presented here, however, this previous study found a positive correlation between parent and offspring productivity.…”

“…One day reproductive success and lifetime reproductive success (“productivity”) of these parental lines was scored as a component of this experiment; these productivity results have already been published (for full details, see: Nguyen & Moehring, , , respectively). Briefly, virgins from the ten isofemale lines were crossed in four replicates of a full diallel design (400 pairings total).…”

“…We did not separate crosses of males and females from the same line from those between lines as there is not a decreased short‐term (7 day) or long‐term (lifetime reproductive success) number of offspring produced when males and females of the same line are paired (Nguyen & Moehring, ), nor is there a decrease in the number of offspring F 1 sons produce when the sons come from an inbred pairing of parents. However, since F 1 daughters do show an effect on productivity when they were generated from an inbred pairing, we also re‐analysed the data with inbred and outbred crosses separated.…”

Wolbachia infection can bias estimates of intralocus sexual conflict

“…Given the potential for Wolbachia to influence fitness estimates, and potentially to create signals of intralocus conflict, what should we do about it? Reproductive success is the primary sex‐specific measure of fitness (e.g., Baker et al, ; Nguyen & Moehring, ; Punzalan et al, ; Potdar, Daniel, Thomas, Lall, & Sheeba, ; Sharp & Agrawal, ; Tobler, Hermisson, & Schlötterer, ; Travers, Garcia‐Gonzalez, & Simmons, ), but in a range of invertebrates, sexual fitness might be affected by Wolbachia . This is particularly true for Drosophila species given that in 2005 it was reported that ca.…”