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Science 21 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5905, pp. 1241 - 1243
DOI: 10.1126/science.1163766
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Reports

Selfish Genetic Elements Promote Polyandry in a Fly

T. A. R. Price,1 D. J. Hodgson,1 Z. Lewis,2 G. D. D. Hurst,3 N. Wedell1*

It is unknown why females mate with multiple males when mating is frequently costly and a single copulation often provides enough sperm to fertilize all a female's eggs. One possibility is that remating increases the fitness of offspring, because fertilization success is biased toward the sperm of high-fitness males. We show that female Drosophila pseudoobscura evolved increased remating rates when exposed to the risk of mating with males carrying a deleterious sex ratio–distorting gene that also reduces sperm competitive ability. Because selfish genetic elements that reduce sperm competitive ability are generally associated with low genetic fitness, they may represent a common driver of the evolution of polyandry.

1 School of Biosciences, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn TR10 9EZ, UK.
2 Graduate School of Environmental Science, Okayama University, Okayama 700-8530, Japan.
3 School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: n.wedell{at}exeter.ac.uk

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Proteomics and Comparative Genomic Investigations Reveal Heterogeneity in Evolutionary Rate of Male Reproductive Proteins in Mice (Mus domesticus).
M. D. Dean, N. L. Clark, G. D. Findlay, R. C. Karn, X. Yi, W. J. Swanson, M. J. MacCoss, and M. W. Nachman (2009)
Mol. Biol. Evol. 26, 1733-1743
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