does sex of the offspring depend on clutch size?

perenquen

New member
hello,
would someone write on his/her experiences with outcoming sex from one-egg clutch and two-egg clutch in geckos?

i had a discussion about this with one of my friends who breeds Coleonyx elegans and Paroedura picta. his females produce mostly one-egg clutches and he has significantly high ratio of males in the offspring.
both species should be GSD, as far as i know...

the hypothesis is that for the female it is better to invest in males, because in this way her genes have better chance to spread (one male can copulate with more females). the mechanism of female influencing her offspring´s sex is probably through sex hormones put into the egg during gravity. she invests also less energy into clutch (forming only one egg), with male coming out the reproduction success is quite high...

i´m not very educated in population genetics and "selfish gene" things...so i´m sorry if the mentioned hypothesis is not correct :?

my C. elegans female produced more one-egg clutches last season and from these, males developed. also this year she had almost all clutches with one egg, so i´m wondering if there will be exclusively males ? :?
 
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perenquen

New member
ok, so after more than 3 months I came to conclusion, that the hypothesis "single-egg-clutch = male" is not correct, at least for my C.elegans :)

in the 2010 season, from 6 eggs (= 6 single-egg clutches) I got 1 male, 3 females, and the remaining 2 are still too young for visual sex determination, but I hope that at least 1 of them is also female :)
 
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