Clinal variation in post-winter male fertility retention; an adaptive overwintering strategy in Drosophila melanogaster

In insects including Drosophila melanogaster, females can overwinter at the adult stage by adopting a shallow reproductive diapause, but almost nothing is known about male reproductive diapause. In this study, we test for the maintenance of fertility in overwintering males from the eastern Australian D. melanogaster cline. Males from southern temperate populations maintained in field cages in temperate Melbourne had a higher fertility in spring compared with males from tropical locations. Temperate males successfully inseminated more females, and there were also more offspring produced per inseminated female. The resulting linear post-winter fertility clines were unrelated to male body size. In contrast, there was no clinal variation for fertility in nonoverwintering males held in the laboratory. The cline in overwintering male fertility is likely to have evolved as an adaptive response to latitudinal climatic variation over the last 100 years.