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Sperm phenotype and it's relationship to individual condition
Köstelová, Linda ; Svobodová, Jana (advisor) ; Pavlína, Pavlína (referee)
Animals are known to have evolved many different characters in order to improve their chances during the sexual selection. These secondary sexual characters should correlate with given male´s quality of ejaculate, according to previous research. The literal part of this paper shows us, that the longer the sperm was, the faster, more viable and agile it was. There was a connection between the viability and the length of the middle part of the sperm, that holds the mitochondria. At the same time, sperms with longer tails were faster, as oppose to those with bigger heads, that were slower. This paper was meant to clarify the influence the sperm phenotype on male's ejaculate. For this paper, which focuses on Great tit, the sperm length was chosen as the character of quality. Not only the length of the whole sperm, but also the length of all of its parts were measured. Every one of these parts is associated with the movement and the viability of the sperm in its own way. We tested whether the length of the sperm correlates with characters of the condition or not. The characters we had chosen for this were the length of melanine ornament, the weight of the male, the length of tars and number of leukocytes in blood. The results show that the length of the sperm head correlates with the length of melanine ornament of Great tit. We did not find any other connection among the other secondary sexual characters we had chosen.
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