Concordance of mammalian ejaculate features.
Different measures of ejaculate characteristics, such as ejaculate volume, proportion of normal sperm, proportion of motile sperm, and total number of sperm per ejaculate, are directly related to the probability of fertilization both when females copulate with a single male and particularly with multiple males. Selection will therefore favour the evolution of ejaculate characteristics which enhance the probability of fertilization, and I predict positive relations between ejaculate parameters. I used a literature survey of mammalian ejaculate parameters to test this prediction. The data set was corrected for similarity between taxa which resulted from common ancestry, and was reduced to statistically independent standardized linear contrasts. The number of sperm per ejaculate and ejaculate volume were positively related to body mass, but when the confounding effect of body mass was controlled for, all four ejaculate characteristics showed positive relations, and five out of six were statistically significant. This suggests that the different measures of ejaculate quality in mammals have been improved simultaneously, apparently by a common selective force.
Department of Zoology, Uppsala University, Sweden.
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D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001824:Body Constitution; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D004542:Ejaculation; D005260:Female; D005306:Fertilization; D007315:Insemination, Artificial; D008297:Male; D008322:Mammals / Q000502:physiology*; D013076:Sperm Count; D013081:Sperm Motility