查看更多>>摘要：Sexual conflict is common in animals,and female sexual cannibalism represents an extreme form of sexual conflict.Males in many species have evolved a variety of strategies to circumvent or de-crease the risk of female sexual cannibalism.Opportunistic mating,by which a male mates with a female when she is disturbed or when she is feeding or undertaking moulting,is one of such kinds of strategies,and widely occurs in many animals,especially in spiders.However,whether the oc-currence of male opportunistic mating depends on the intensity of female sexual cannibalism remains largely unexplored.We predicted a positive correlation between them.In this study,we tested this prediction by performing a series of mating trials in the laboratory using 3 species of web-building spiders with different intensities of female sexual cannibalism:Nephila pilipes,Nephilengys malabarensis,and Parasteatoda tepidariorum.We found that the occurrence of male opportunistic mating was positively,though not statistically significantly,correlated with the inten-sity of female sexual cannibalism,thus supporting our hypothesis.All together,we provide evi-dence that male opportunistic mating may have evolved to respond to the selection pressure posed by female sexual cannibalism.
查看更多>>摘要：Males and females have conflicting interests on the frequency and outcomes of mating interac-tions.Males maximize their fitness by mating with as many females as possible,whereas choosy females often reduce receptivity following copulation.Alternative male mating tactics can be adap-tive in their expression to a variety of mating contexts,including interactions with a relatively unre-ceptive mated female.Male Rabidosa punctulata wolf spiders can adopt distinctive mating tactics when interacting with a female,a complex courtship display,and/or a more coercive direct mount tactic that often involves grappling with females for copulation.In this study,we set up female mat-ing treatments with initial trials and then paired mated and unmated females with males to observe both female remating frequencies and the male mating tactics used during the interactions.Males adopted different mating tactics depending on the mating status of the female they were paired with.Males were more likely to adopt a direct mount tactic with already-mated females and court-ship with unmated females.Already-mated females were considerably less receptive to males dur-ing experimental trials,although they did remate 34％of the time,the majority of which were with males using a direct mount tactic.Whereas males adjusting to these contextual cues were able to gain more copulations,the observation of multiple mating in female R.punctulata introduces the potential for sperm competition.We discuss this sexual conflict in terms of the fitness consequen-ces of these mating outcomes for both males and females.
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