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Some sperm traits are now recognized as ornaments akin to peacock’s tails evolving under cryptic female choice or weapons in sexual conflicts, but there are still few studies addressing patterns and process in sperm-female evolution. We are studying sperm-female evolution in ground beetles of the genus  Dyschirius . Male  Dyschirius  make groups of sperm, termed conjugates, by pairing sperm to non-cellular rods, or spermatostyles. This pairing creates a conflict for storage space in the female’s reproductive tract between sperm and the spermatostyle, which is incapable of fertilizing eggs. We speculate that the conjugates of some  Dyschirius  that include large spermatostyles with few sperm are ornaments. We hypothesize that increased spermathecal storage volume is positively correlated with larger spermatostyles and that male genitalic complexity is negatively correlated with elaboration of sperm. We gathered morphological trait data on sperm conjugates and male and female genitalia from several species of  Dyschirius . We analyzed these data in a phylogenetic framework using a robust  Dyschirius  species tree derived from DNA sequence data. We present preliminary results from this ongoing study and solicit feedback from the ECM community.

Conflicts in sperm: how do genitalia coevolve with elaborate sperm?