From BENONI SEGHERS
In their article ‘Faithless female seeks better genes . . .’ Tim Birkhead
and Anders Moller credit Geoff Parker with coining the term ‘sperm competition’
in 1970. This honour should probably go to the Danish geneticist, O. Winge,
who studied sperm storage in the guppy fish in the 1920s and 1930s. In his
letter to Nature in 1937 he noted that ‘. . . there is competition between
the spermatozoa . . .’ with sperm from a new male outcompeting the sperm
stored in the female from a previous mating. In 1954, W. H. Hildemann and
E. D. Wagner explored this further in the guppy in a paper in The American
Naturalist entitled, ‘Intraspecific sperm competition in Lebistes reticulatus’.
Benoni Seghers University of Oxford
