Adaptive self superparasitism in a solitary parasitoid wasp: the influence of clutch size on offspring size
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary In solitary parasitoid Hymenoptera, normally only one offspring per host survives. Parasitism with more than one egg by the same female results in siblicide and hence is generally maladaptive. The braconid wasp Monoctonus paulensis Ashmead is a solitary parasitoid of aphids, including the Pea Aphid. Although all but one offspring are eliminated by competition between first‐instar larvae, females often produce a multiple‐egg clutch, even when searching alone. The hypothesis that the size and, presumably, the fitness of the surviving offspring in a clutch are greater than that of singly developing counterparts was tested in the laboratory. Adult size was measured as dry mass in parasitoids developing in Pea Aphids that differed in size (instar) and growth potential. Parasitoid size increased with host size, and females were larger than males. Parasitoids developing in aphids reared under crowded conditions (which had low growth potential) were smaller relative to initial host size. As predicted, the male offspring of virgin mothers developing in a clutch were 4–5% larger than counterparts developing alone. Clutch size had no consistent effect on the size of male or female offspring of mated mothers, however. A female of M. paulensis laying a multiple‐egg clutch can gain in fitness in terms of increased offspring size. The surviving offspring has access to greater nutritional resources because superparasitized aphids feed more than single‐parasitized aphids; the former also contain proportionately more teratocytes, which are egg‐derived cells aiding in parasitoid nutrition. Evidence that some species of solitary parasitoids do better when developing in a clutch suggests that the solitary lifestyle may not be an evolutionary absorbing state.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".