Researchers from the University of California, Riverside, have found evidence which suggests male guppies can continue reproducing up to 10 months after their death by storing their sperms in female guppies.
Researchers from the University of California,Riverside, conducted a study wherein they found male guppies use female guppies to continue reproducing even after their death. Male guppies are known to have a life span of only three to four months while female guppies live for about two years. Hence, male guppies store their sperms in female guppies, which allow them to reproduce up to ten months after their death.
David Reznick, a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside, and the principal investigator of the research project stated in a press release that when the population size of a certain species is small, they face the risk of extinction as close relatives end up breeding with one another, which leads to the offspring suffering due to inbreeding. However, when sperm is stored, the chances of relatives breeding with one another decrease and the population size increases. Another benefit of this sperm storage is that it increases genetic variation in other ways.
Male guppies are vibrant in color and female guppies prefer male guppies with unique color patterns. According to the study findings, a dead male guppy can reproduce a son that can grab the attention of living females because he is different from all other males in the population. Since females are known to live much longer than males, a male can have a son two generations after his death even.
"Adult female guppies are the strongest swimmers and now we know they are the best able to colonize new habitats," Reznick said. "Long term sperm storage means that a single female can colonize a new site and establish a new population that has a fair measure of genetic diversity since we have found that the older, larger females can carry the sperm of several males. Plants do the same sort of thing differently. They produce seeds that can lay dormant in the soil for decades so each year new offspring can appear that represent many prior generations of parents. Water fleas also lay eggs that can lie dormant for long intervals of time. But this is the first time we see such a phenomenon in a vertebrate."
Reznick also revealed that this study was the first to look at the large lifespan difference between male and female guppies.
