Ciliate mating systems are highly diversified, providing unique opportunities to study sexual differentiation and its implications for mating dynamics. Many species of ciliates have multiple (>2) sexes. More sexes may mean more choice and an opportunity for evolution of preferential mating. We asked if the multiple sexes of the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila mate preferentially among each othe...

Question: How is parent–offspring conflict over the sex ratio affected by mating system and sex-specific dispersal? Methods: Inclusive fitness maximization models and dynamic simulations. Life cycle: Patch-structured diploid population, fixed number of adult females per patch, sex-specific dispersal of offspring, mating after dispersal, competition for breeding sites. The mating system is monog...

Speciation caused by intrinsically forming barriers to gene flow is demonstrated using simulated populations. Although theory predicts that underdominance would be quickly eliminated from randomly mating populations, herein it is shown that when mating interactions are localized, mild underdominance can persist for long periods, as interbreeding populations self-organize into patches of compati...

Complete individual-wide mating-type bias (retrieval of sporidia of only one mating type from germinated teliospores of one fungal individual) was observed to be a common and widespread feature of the anther-smut fungus, Ustilago violacea, collected from natural populations of its host, Silene alba. The bias was usually to mating type Al, but the frequency of bias and its spatial distribution v...

Abstract Mating behavior in animals can be understood as a sequence of events that begins with individuals encountering one another and ends the production offspring. Behavioral descriptions animal interactions characterize early elements this sequence, genetic use offspring parentage to final outcome, behavioral physiological assessments mates mechanisms copulation fertilization comprising int...