Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia
Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia.
Biol Lett. 2017 Apr;13(4). doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0087.
Until recently, paternal effects-the influence of fathers on their offspring due to environmental factors rather than genes-were largely discarded or assumed to be confined to species exhibiting paternal care. It is now recognized that paternal effects can be transmitted through the ejaculate, but unambiguous evidence for them is scarce, because it is difficult to isolate effects operating via changes to the ejaculate from maternal effects driven by female mate assessment. Here, we use artificial insemination to disentangle mate assessment from fertilization in guppies, and show that paternal effects can be transmitted to offspring exclusively via ejaculates. We show that males fed reduced diets produce poor-quality sperm and that offspring sired by such males (via artificial insemination) exhibit reduced body size at birth. These findings may have important implications for the many mating systems in which environmentally induced changes in ejaculate quality have been reported.
直到最近，父本效应——由于环境因素而非基因，父亲对子代的影响——还在很大程度上被忽视或被认为仅局限于表现出父性照顾的物种。现在人们认识到，父本效应可以通过精液传递，但明确的证据却很少，因为很难将通过精液改变而产生的效应与由雌性配偶评估驱动的母体效应区分开来。在这里，我们使用人工授精在孔雀鱼中分离出配偶评估和受精过程，并表明父本效应可以仅通过精液传递给后代。我们发现，喂食低营养饮食的雄性会产生质量较差的精子，而通过人工授精由这些雄性（父本）产生的后代（子一代）在出生时的体型会更小。这些发现可能对许多交配系统具有重要意义，因为在这些系统中已经报道了环境诱导的精液质量变化。
