Can sexual conflict drive transitions to asexuality? Female resistance to fertilization in a facultatively parthenogenetic insect.

Facultatively parthenogenetic animals could help reveal the role of sexual conflict in the evolution of sex. Although each female can reproduce both sexually (producing sons and daughters from fertilized eggs) and asexually (typically producing only daughters from unfertilized eggs), these animals often form distinct sexual and asexual populations. We hypothesized that asexual populations are maintained through female resistance as well as the decay of male traits.

Genetic and Phenotypic Consequences of Local Transitions between Sexual and Parthenogenetic Reproduction in the Wild.

AbstractTransitions from sexual to asexual reproduction have occurred in numerous lineages, but it remains unclear why asexual populations rarely persist. In facultatively parthenogenetic animals, all-female populations can arise when males are absent or become extinct, and such populations could help to understand the genetic and phenotypic changes that occur in the initial stages of transitions to asexuality. We investigated a naturally occurring spatial mosaic of mixed-sex and all-female populations of the facultatively parthenogenetic Australian phasmid .