CRE Investigators Publish study in Nature

Collaborative research by CRE members Pitnick, Belote and Puniamoorthy, together with CRE alumni Lüpold, Manier and othersreveal that the giant sperm some Drosophila may be the most extreme ornaments in all of nature and demonstrate how their existence challenges theories explaining the intensity of sexual selection, mating-system evolution and the fundamental nature of sex differences. The study also combined quantitative genetic analyses of interacting sex-specific traits in D. melanogaster with comparative analyses of the condition dependence of male and female reproductive potential across species with varying ornament size to reveal complex dynamics that may underlie sperm-length evolution.