No evidence for prezygotic postcopulatory avoidance of kin despite high inbreeding depression

Offspring resulting from mating among close relatives can suffer from impaired fitness through the expression of recessive alleles with deleterious effects. Post-copulatory sperm selection (a pre-zygotic mechanism of cryptic female choice) has been suggested to be an effective way to avoid inbreeding. To investigate whether post-copulatory female choice allows avoiding fertilization by close kin, we performed artificial inseminations in a promiscuous bird, the houbara bustard (Chlamydotis undulata undulata). Females were inseminated with a mix of sperm from triads of males, each constituted of a male genetically unrelated to the female, a first cousin, and a half-sibling. When counting the number of eggs sired by unrelated males, cousins or half-siblings, we found a significant deviation from the expected random distribution, with more eggs sired by unrelated males. However, offspring sired by cousins, and especially by half-siblings suffered from high pre-hatching mortality, suggesting...