Abstract
Males can control female reproduction using genital plugs to impede access by rivals.In social bees,ants,and wasps,plugging may involve traumatic mating,with females being harmed.In stingless bees,chances are that plugs may promote ovarian activan,and are thought to ensure sin-gle mating—a general tendency among the social Hymenoptera.However,understanding on rela-tionships between mating plugs,traumatic mating,and mating systems in stingless bees remains limited.To address this,we(1)compared mated queens of 7 Neotropical species to understand the patterns of copulatory marks in females and(2)compared pre-and post-mating genitalia of males and females in Melipona fasciculata to depict plug functional morphology.Data revealed an unpre-cedented consequence of mating in stingless bees:the characteristic marks left by mating plugs on female abdomens and the inferences that can be made from them.To our surprise,in 1 species M.fasciculata we found that queens retain the plug long after mating,and may carry it for the rest of their lives.All the other 6 species retained the plug for only a short period.Remated queens were only found in M.seminigra,whose multiple copulatory marks match previous findings of polyan-dry in this species.Our study shows that queens can remate,and suggests that male genital morphology may determine in part the time persistence of plugs.We conclude that traumatic mat-ing plugs do not fully prevent remating in stingless bees and that mating systems are not uniform in this group.Nonetheless,exceptional cases of facultative polyandry in social insects—for ex-ample,when mating plugs fail—may confirm a general tendency for single mating in close link with efficient mating plugs.
基金项目
Coordena-o de Aperfei-oamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior-CAPES/Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária-EMBRAPA(15/2014)
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico-CNPq through the PVE 2014 Project(400435/2014-4)
维普
万方数据