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Frederic Tripet, Sperm Competition and Its Evolutionary Consequences in the Insects, Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Volume 96, Issue 2, 1 March 2003, Page 170, https://doi.org/10.1603/0013-8746(2003)096[0170:SCAIEC]2.0.CO;2
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Leigh W. Simmons Editors: John R. Krebs and Tim Clutton-Brock Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2001, 448 pp., ISBN (Paper) 0-619-05988-8 Price: 35$, ISBN (Cloth) 0-619-05987-X Price: 75$
Entomologists and taxonomists in particular have long recognized the diversity and often puzzling complexity of insect genitalia, but it is not until relatively recently that a conceptual framework emerged for exploring the function and evolution of such elaborate structures. In his seminal review, “Sperm competition and its evolutionary consequences in the insects,” Geoff Parker (1970) was the first to outline the broad implications that the temporal overlap of competing ejaculates within the female reproductive tract holds for an organism’s reproductive traits. From the evolution of complex genitalia designed for removing sperm deposited by previous males, to that of mating plugs and other accessory gland proteins preventing females to subsequently mate, not to mention the evolution of behavioral adaptations such as mate guarding and morphological adaptations of sperm cells themselves, the venues in which sperm competition affects an organism are many and, at the time, were largely unexplored. It is therefore not surprising if in the last 30 years this area of research literally exploded. A mere dozen papers were published on sperm competition in the 1970s, about 60 in the 1980s, more than 500 in the 1990s and projections for this decade are around a staggering 2,000 (approximations compiled from the Web of Science for all organisms).
