Who’s your daddy? A behavioral and genetic study of multiple paternity in a polygamous marine invertebrate, Octopus oliveri
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Ecology, Genetics, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- microsatellite, mating behavior, cephalopod, reproduction
- Copyright
- © 2018 Ylitalo et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Who’s your daddy? A behavioral and genetic study of multiple paternity in a polygamous marine invertebrate, Octopus oliveri. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27309v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27309v1
Abstract
Octopus oliveri is a widespread and common rocky intertidal cephalopod that mates readily in the laboratory, but for which mating behavior has not been reported previously. Four sets of behavioral experiments were recorded wherein three males, in varying order, were introduced to each of the six females, for a total of 24 females and 12 males. Video analysis shows that successful mating occurred in each of the mount, reach and beak-to-beak positions. Mating was observed for all males, regardless of size relative to the female, or order of introduction. Females showed preference for the first male to which they were introduced in experimental pairings rather than any specific male trait, and mating time increased significantly with increasing female size. Five novel microsatellite markers were developed and used to test paternity in the eleven broods resulting from these experimental pairings. We find skewed paternity in each brood, with early male precedence and male size being the best predictors of parentage. Multiple paternity was observed in every experimental cross but was estimated to be comparatively low in the field, suggesting that sperm limitation may be common in this species. We see no evidence of direct sperm competition in Octopus oliveri, but larger males produce significantly more offspring, perhaps because they can include more spermatozoa in spermatophores. This study contributes to the growing research on cephalopod mating systems and indicates that octopus mating dynamics may be more variable and complex than thought previously.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary figures from the manuscript and microsatellite primer sequences
Additional figures, analyses and a complete list of microsatellite loci discovered for Octopus oliveri to support the presentation of data in the primary manuscript.
R code for the analyses of mating behavior in Octopus oliveri.
FASTA sequences for the 48 isolated microsatellite repeats included in the manuscript, from which a subset were used in this study
Raw sequence data from which microsatellite loci described in this study were designed. We present all 48 loci discovered from our sequencing efforts although only a subset were tested and used in this study.