Green Open AccessAll journals published by CSIRO Publishing allow authors to deposit the Accepted version of their manuscript into an institutional repository or put it on a personal website, with no embargo.The Accepted version is the author-created, peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript. The Publisher's edited or typeset versions cannot be used. The institutional repository should be that of the institution employing the author at the time the work was conducted or PubMed Central. We ask that authors link to the published version on the CSIRO Publishing website, wherever possible. The male gamete, the spermatozoon, exhibits considerable interspecies morphological variation 17 across mammals, especially among murid rodents. In Australasia most murids in the Tribe 18Hydromyini have a spermatozoon with a highly complex head that has, in addition to an apical hook 19 characteristic of most murids, two further projections that extend from its upper concave surface, 20 the ventral processes. Here we performed a phylogenetically controlled comparison of sperm 21 morphology across 44 species of hydromyine rodents to test the hypothesis that the length and 22angle of both the ventral processes and apical hook, as well as the dimensions of the sperm tail, 23 increase with relative testes mass as a proxy for differences in levels of intermale sperm 24 competition. Although both sperm head protrusions exhibited considerable variation in their length 25 and angle across species, only the angles increased significantly in relation to relative testes mass. 26Significant positive relationships were also evident between relative testes mass and lengths of the 27 sperm midpiece and flagellum. These results suggest that in the sperm head of hydromyine rodents, 28 the angle of the ventral processes, as well as that of the apical hook, together with the sperm tail 29 length, are likely to be under sexual selection. The possible functional significance of these findings 30 is discussed.
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