Mentor: Dean Castillo, Ph.D.

Female mating decisions play a critical role in evolution, and these decisions extend beyond mate selection to include how females store and utilize sperm after mating. In Drosophila psuedoobscura, females store sperm in distinct organs, allowing for potential selection between sperm from multiple males. Previous work has shown that sperm competition contributes both to sexual selection and speciation, and that sperm competition dynamics differ across populations. Using females from these different geographies and males that had fluorescently labeled sperm, we examined how sperm is stored over time in female reproductive tracts. Our findings suggest that sperm storage is qualitatively the same across populations suggesting that initial storage would not contribute to sperm competition differences. This suggests that additional mechanisms might contribute to sperm storage when females mate with multiple males.

Explore Project