This latter idea was suggested by Short (1979) in a comparative study of primate testis size, although as with so many ideas in biology, this had been anticipated much earlier by the extraordinary nineteenth-century Swedish biologist,
Gustaf Retzius (see Birkhead & Montgomerie, 2009). In fact, the idea that relative testis size reflected promiscuity was recognized even earlier by John Ray and Francis Willughby in their encyclopaedia of 1676, wherein describing the European quail Coturnix coturnix, they stated: ‘The cock has great testicles for the bigness of its body, whence we may infer that it is a salacious bird’. They were correct, and we now know that sperm competition is frequent in this species (Rodrigo-Rueda et al., 1997). Willughby and Ray made the same buy Palbociclib inference as did Short, reasoning that large testes were associated with frequent male copulation. However, once Short
had read Parker’s (1970) early studies of sperm competition in insects, he recognized that rather than favouring male copulation frequency per se, it was female promiscuity that selected for both frequent male copulation and high sperm numbers as a way of males maximizing their likelihood of selleckchem fathering offspring. Large testes produce sperm at a higher rate (Amann, 1970), and it is now clear that across the entire animal kingdom, relatively large testes are tightly linked to high levels of female promiscuity (Birkhead & Møller, 1998; MacLeod
& MacLeod, 2009) and provide a useful clue to understanding mating systems. A key question in the study of sperm competition was whether there were any rules that determined which of several males inseminating a female would fertilize her eggs? As related by Smith (1998), it was studies starting in the 1930s that were designed to control certain insect pest species by a sterilization procedure that identified both the widespread nature of female insect promiscuity and the fact that the sterile male technique C59 mouse could be used to investigate the outcome of promiscuity. By the 1930s, it was already known that the second of two males to inseminate a female generally fathered the majority of her eggs (Smith, 1984 and references therein). The sterile male technique was used by Parker to show that in his dungflies, the second of two males to inseminate a female in succession fertilized the majority (∼80%) of the eggs (Simmons, 2001). By coincidence, a similar pattern was apparent in birds. Starting in the 1920s, poultry biologists recognized that the last male fathered most offspring in females mated either naturally by two males in succession or artificially inseminated with semen from two males in succession. This phenomenon, in both insects and birds, was referred to as last male sperm precedence, or as P2 – the proportion of offspring fathered by the second insemination (Birkhead & Møller, 1992; Simmons, 2001).