Sexually antagonistic genetic variation in a simultaneous hermaphrodite

TIM JANICKE; ELODIE CHAPUIS; STEFANIA MECONCELLI; NICOLÁS BONEL; PATRICE DAVID

Lausanne

Congreso; 15th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology; 2015

European Society for Evolutionary Biology

Simultaneous hermaphrodites express both sex functions at the same time offering unique forms of sexual conflict to arise. These include conflicts over the sex role that both interacting individuals adopt when mating and the manipulation of the partners? sex allocation by the sperm donor. Over the last two decades, significant strides have been made in characterising sexual conflicts in simultaneous hermaphrodites but until now very little is known about intra-locus sexual conflicts in these organisms, which are thought result from opposing fitness effects of an allele when expressed in a sperm donor and a sperm recipient. Here, we report an empirical test of intra-locus sexual conflict in the simultaneously hermaphroditic freshwater snail Physa acuta. We explored pre- and post-copulatory reproductive performance of the male and female sex function and tested for sexually antagonistic genetic variation of several fitness components. This was done under varying levels of food availability using a full-sib breeding design.