Abstract
The ubiquity of sex in the face of what is called the 'cost of meiosis' represents one of the major paradoxes of evolutionary biology1–3. Theoretical work has shown that sexual females can only be maintained in mixed populations of sexual and asexual females if their offspring are of the order of twice as fit as those of asexual females1–8. Previous experiments using the grass Anthoxanthum odoratum have shown substantial fitness advantages for genetically variable arrays of individuals relative to genetically uniform arrays planted in particular experimental designs9–12. Yet, in natural conditions progeny do not become arranged at set spacings in arbitrary places within a population, but are dispersed around parents to form a 'seed shadow' with decreasing density away from source13. We report here the results of an experiment designed to simulate the natural dispersal pattern of progeny around parents when these progeny are either genetically uniform and identical to parent, or sexually-produced by those parents and genetically variable. Our data show that sexually generated progeny of Anthoxanthum odoratum have reproductive rates, summed over two years, that are 1.43 times those of their asexually generated siblings.
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Kelley, S., Antonovics, J. & Schmitt, J. A test of the short-term advantage of sexual reproduction. Nature 331, 714–716 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1038/331714a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/331714a0
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