SGER: Determining kin recognition in marine gastropods

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This Small Grant for Exploratory Research award is designed to investigate the relationship between reproductive patterns (i.e., whether the species produces larvae or not) and inbreeding in marine systems. The main hypothesis proposes that a species without free-living larvae will likely encounter close relatives as potential mates due to their relatively limited capacity for dispersal. Thus, the PI hypothesizes that such species without free-living larvae will most likely demonstrate kin recognition as a means of minimizing inbreeding. Alternatively, deleterious alleles may already be largely purged from the population of the direct developer through extensive inbreeding so that selection against inbreeding may no longer be strong enough to select for kin recognition and avoidance. Finally, it is also possible that close relatives in direct developing species mate routinely and produce progeny that exhibit inbreeding depression. The PI will conduct controlled matings for Crepidula fornicata and C. convexa to assess whether males and females discriminate between full-siblings and non-relatives in choosing mates. The experiment will be repeated forty times for each of the two snail species. The proposed work is extremely labor-intensive, but will give definitive results.