Male Mating Success and Female Fitness in the Mediterranean Fruit Fly (Diptera: Tephritidae)

Theory suggests that consistent individual variation in behavior relates to fitness, but few studies have empirically examined the role of personalities in mate choice, male-male competition and reproductive success. We observed the Mediterranean black widow, Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, in the individual and mating context, to test how body size measures and two functionally important aggressive behaviors, i.e., male aggression towards rivals and female voracity towards prey, affect mating behaviors, mating success and sexual cannibalism. We specifically selected voracity towards prey in females to test the “aggressive spillover hypothesis”, suggesting that more voracious females are more sexually cannibalistic. Both females and males exhibit consistent individual differences in the examined aggressive behaviors. While larger males win contests more often and achieve more copulations, neither male nor female size measures correlate to aggression. Female voracity does not correlate with aggression towards mates and sexual cannibalism, rejecting the “spillover hypothesis”. However, occurrence of sexual cannibalism positively relates to longer insertion duration. Furthermore, the smaller the ratio between male and female body length the more likely a female attacked and cannibalized a mate. We show that individual variation in aggression levels plays no direct role in the mating behavior of the Mediterranean black widow. Instead, body size affects male mating success and occurrences of sexual cannibalism in females.

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Traumatic mating increases anchorage of mating male and reduces female remating duration and fecundity in a scorpionfly species

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rspb.2021.0235 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 288 (1952) ◽

pp. 20210235

Author(s):

Xin Tong ◽

Peng-Yang Wang ◽

Mei-Zhuo Jia ◽

Randy Thornhill ◽

Bao-Zhen Hua

Keyword(s):

Low Temperature ◽

Mating Success ◽

Copulation Duration ◽

Male Mating ◽

Male Mating Success ◽

Female Fitness ◽

Female Fecundity ◽

Male And Female ◽

Female Remating ◽

Egg Deposition

Traumatic mating is the male wounding his mate during mating using specialized anatomy. However, why males have evolved to injure their mates during mating remains poorly understood. We studied traumatic mating in Dicerapanorpa magna to determine its effects on male and female fitness. The sharp teeth on male gonostyli penetrate the female genitalia and cause copulatory wounds, and the number of scars on the female genitals is positively related to the number of times females mated. When the injurious teeth were encased with low-temperature wax, preventing their penetration of the female's genitalia during mating, male mating success and copulation duration were reduced significantly, indicating the importance of the teeth in allowing the male to secure copulation, remain in copula and effectively inseminate his mate. The remating experiments showed that traumatic mating had little effect on the female mating refractory period, but significantly reduced female remating duration with subsequent males, probably benefiting the first-mating male with longer copulation duration and transferring more sperm into the female's spermatheca. The copulatory wounds reduced female fecundity, but did not accelerate the timing of egg deposition. This is probably the first report that traumatic mating reduces female remating duration through successive remating experiments in animals. Overall, our results provide evidence that traumatic mating in the scorpionfly helps increase the male's anchoring control during mating and provides him advantage in sperm competition, but at the expense of lowering female fecundity.

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