Evolution of reproductive structures for in‐flight mating in thynnine wasps (Hymenoptera: Thynnidae: Thynninae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thynnine wasps have an unusual mating system that involves concurrent in-flight copulation and nuptial feeding of wingless females by alate males. Consequently, thynnine genitalia play a multifunctional role and have likely been subject to various different selective pressures for both reproductive success and food provisioning. Here, we present a new molecular phylogeny for the Australian Thynninae and use 3D-geometric morphometrics and comparative methods to investigate the morphological evolution of select genital structures across the group. We found significant morphological integration between all male and female structures analysed, which is likely influenced by sexual selection, but also reproductive isolation requirements and mechanical constraints. The morphology of the primary male and female coupling structures was correlated with female body size, and female genitalia exhibited strong negative size allometry. Those male and female coupling structures have evolved at similar evolutionary rates, whereas female structures appear to have evolved a higher degree of morphological novelty over time. We conclude that the unique reproductive strategies of thynnine wasps have resulted in complex evolutionary patterns in their genital morphology, which has likely played a central role in the extensive diversification of the subfamily across Australasia and South America. Our study reinforces the need to treat composite characters such as genitalia by their component parts, and to consider the roles of both male and female reproductive structures in evolutionary studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".