ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Post-copulatory sexual selection allows females to alleviate the fitness costs incurred when mating with senescing males.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Gut Microbiota Is Linked to Female Olfactory Preference in Giant Pandas.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Sperm storage causes sperm senescence in human and non-human animals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Reproductive output of old males is limited by seminal fluid, not sperm number.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Article
- Fasting increases investment in soma upon refeeding at the cost of gamete quality in zebrafish.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Ranking parameters driving siring success during sperm competition in the North African houbara bustard.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Separating the effects of paternal age and mating history: Evidence for sex-specific paternal effect in eastern mosquitofish.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Female preferences for male golden snub-nosed monkeys vary with male age and social context.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Enforced monoandry over generations induces a reduction of female investment into reproduction in a promiscuous bird.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
- Beneficial cumulative effects of old parental age on offspring fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Male age alone predicts paternity success under sperm competition when effects of age and past mating effort are experimentally separated.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Reproductive performance in houbara bustard is affected by the combined effects of age, inbreeding and number of generations in captivity.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The deteriorating soma and the indispensable germline: gamete senescence and offspring fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Post-copulatory sexual selection allows females to alleviate the fitness costs incurred when mating with senescing males.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Triparental ageing in a laboratory population of an insect with maternal care.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Male senescence has detrimental effects on reproductive success and offspring fitness. When females mate with multiple males during the same reproductive bout, post-copulatory sexual selection that operates either through sperm competition or cryptic female choice might allow females to skew fertilization success towards young males and as such limit the fitness costs incurred when eggs are fertilized by senescing males. Here, we experimentally tested this hypothesis. We artificially inseminated female North African houbara bustards with sperm from dyads of males of different (young and old) or similar ages (either young or old). Then, we assessed whether siring success was biased towards young males and we measured several life-history traits of the progeny to evaluate the fitness costs due to advanced paternal age. In agreement with the prediction, we found that siring success was biased towards young males, and offspring sired by old males had impaired hatching success, growth and post-release survival (in females). Overall, our results support the hypothesis that post-copulatory sexual selection might represent an effective mechanism allowing females to avoid the fitness costs of fertilization by senescing partners.
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