Genetic architecture of conspecific sperm precedence in Allonemobius fasciatus and A. socius.

The evolution of barriers to gene exchange is centrally important to speciation. We used the crickets Allonemobius fasciatus and A. socius to investigate the genetic architecture of conspecific sperm precedence (CSP), a postinsemination prezygotic reproductive barrier. With amplified fragment-length polymorphism (AFLP) markers and controlled crosses we constructed linkage maps and estimated positions of QTL associated with CSP. The majority of QTL have low to moderate effects, although a few QTL exist in A. socius with large effects, and the numbers of QTL are comparable to numbers of genes accounting for species differences in other studies. The QTL are spread across many unlinked markers, yet QTL placed with linked markers are on a small number of linkage groups that could reflect the role of the large Allonemobius sex chromosome in prezygotic isolation. Although many QTL had positive effects on conspecific sperm utilization several QTL also exerted negative effects, which could be explained by intraspecific sexual conflict, sperm competition, or epistasis of introgressed genes on novel backgrounds. One unexpected outcome was that A. socius CSP alleles have a stronger effect than those from A. fasciatus in hybrid females, causing hybrids to behave like A. socius with regard to sperm utilization. Implications of this asymmetry in the Allonemobius hybrid zone are discussed.