Temperature stressed Caenorhabditis elegans males fail to mate successfully and successful males produce very few viable cross progeny

Exposure to moderate temperature stress can have profoundly negative effects on an organism’s reproductive capacity at temperatures where there are minimal or indiscernible effects on the organism as a whole. These negative effects are often more pronounced in males of the species that produce sperm. Previously we showed that few males of Caenorhabditis elegans wild type strains are able to successfully produce any cross progeny after experiencing temperature stress. However, these experiments did not assess the number of progeny from temperature stressed males. To understand if temperature stress can reduce the number of progeny a male sires, we crossed temperature stressed males of three wild type strains of C. elegans: JU1171, LKC34, and N2, to strain matched hermaphrodites of their own genetic background or to uncoordinated hermaphrodites in the N2 background. We found that significantly fewer males exposed to moderate temperature stress can successfully mate and that the small number of males in the population that do successfully mate produce significantly fewer viable cross progeny than unstressed controls. Our results suggest that exposure to moderate temperature stress significantly reduces male C. elegans chances at reproducing similar to what is seen in other organisms.