Spermless males fail to remedy the low fecundity of parthenogenetic females in D. melanogaster.

The recent construction of a parthenogenetic strain of D. melanogaster offers new avenues of research, but this potential is limited by the stock's abysmal fecundity. We tried using spermless (placebo) males to "trick" the virgins into producing more offspring, but the boost that we achieved proved to be short-lived due to premature death of the mothers. To explore the cause of this mortality, we compared the lifespans of parthenogenetic vs. wild-type females when mated with spermless males. We found that parthenogenetic females are less robust than wild-females when raised alone but are more resistant to harm from spermless males.