Local Mate Competition, and Mechanisms, Functions and Fitness Consequences of Courtship and Mating Behaviour in the Parasitoid Wasp Ooencyrtus kuvanae\n(Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Males and females of the egg parasitoid wasp Ooencyrtus kuvanae (Howard) (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae) emerge as sexually mature adults from gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar (L.), host egg masses. Sibling or non-sibling males compete intensely for mating opportunities with spatially clustered monandrous females who are briefly receptive. Mated females typically disperse prior to ovipositing, whereas males disperse in search of mates. My main objectives were to examine the occurrence of local mate competition (LMC), and to tease apart the mechanisms, functions, and fitness consequences of courtship and mating behaviour in O. kuvanae. As predicted by LMC theory, with increasing numbers of foundresses on a host egg mass, the proportion of emerging males increases. Males exhibit one of two mating tactics, a mate-at-once (MAO) tactic, and a harem-gathering and -guarding (HGG) tactic. MAO males immediately mate any receptive female they encounter. HGG males mate the first receptive female they encounter, then transfer a unique pheromone-tag to females without prior male contact, and finally relocate and mate those females they themselves have tagged. Females do not incur direct fitness costs by mating with multiply-mated males. Males are attracted to a close-range female sex pheromone comprising (5S)-methylheptacosane and (5R,17S)-dimethylheptacosane. Conversely, males are repelled by the blend of (5R)-methylheptacosane and (5R,17R)-dimethylheptacosane. This suggests that the stereochemistry of these two hydrocarbons may differ between males and females, and that it could be an underlying mechanism in mate recognition and mate assessment. Immediately prior to copulation, males engage females in a brief pre-copulatory ritual, then mate, and thereafter execute a lengthier post-copulatory ritual. Both rituals entail physical interactions rather than pheromone transfer. Following the pre-copulatory ritual, females enter a receptive state that persists after copulation, whereby a female is susceptible to additional copulations by sneaker males, who compete with the first male to mate for post-copulatory ritual rites. The post-copulatory ritual accelerates the awakening of an in-trance female, who then never mates again. First male sperm precedence lies with the first male to engage a female in the post-copulatory ritual. Therefore, the ritual may represent a male adaptation to prevent sperm competition.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".