Copepods do not mate at random. Rather, they are very picky when deciding whether to mate or not with an encountered mate. Using experiments and molecular paternity analysis this new study demonstrates that it is a rather small fraction of a population of Temora longicornis that accounts for most of the offspring production. A few ‘super-males’ successfully mate most of the mated females and thus sire most of the offspring. And similarly, a few ‘super-females’ receives most of the sperm from males, and thus produce most of the offspring. This quantitative evidence is consistent with previous observations that a large fraction of the females in a field population have never been mated, despite high encounter rate with males. The implication of this discovery is that the effective size of a copepod population is much less the census size and that new models are required to describe copepod population dynamics.
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Reference
Sichlau MH, Nielsen EE, Thygesen UH, and Kiørboe T (2015) Mating success and sexual selection in a pelagic copepod, Temora longicornis: Evidence from paternity analyses. Limnol Oceanogr. doi: 10.1002/lno.10052. Available online