sperm length variation as a predictor of extrapair paternity in passerine birds作为一个精子长度变化预测extrapair父权雀形目的小鸟.pdfVIP

Sperm Length Variation as a Predictor of Extrapair Paternity in Passerine Birds 1 1 1 2 3 Jan T. Lifjeld *, Terje Laskemoen , Oddmund Kleven , Tomas Albrecht , Raleigh J. Robertson 1 National Centre for Biosystematics, Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 2 Department of Population Biology, Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Brno, Czech Republic, 3 Department of Biology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Abstract Background: The rate of extrapair paternity is a commonly used index for the risk of sperm competition in birds, but paternity data exist for only a few percent of the approximately 10400 extant species. As paternity analyses require extensive field sampling and costly lab work, species coverage in this field will probably not improve much in the foreseeable future. Recent findings from passerine birds, which constitute the largest avian order (,5 900 species), suggest that sperm phenotypes carry a signature of sperm competition. Here we examine how well standardized measures of sperm length variation can predict the rate of extrapair paternity in passerine birds. Methodology/Principal Findings: We collected sperm samples from 55 passerine species in Canada and Europe for which extrapair paternity rates were already available from either the same (n = 24) or a different (n = 31) study population. We measured the total length of individual spermatozoa and found that both the coefficient of between-male variation (CVbm) and within-male variation (CVwm) in sperm length were strong predictors of the rate of