首页|Male opportunistic mating increases with intensity of female sexual cannibalism in 3 web-building spiders

Male opportunistic mating increases with intensity of female sexual cannibalism in 3 web-building spiders

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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.

opportunistic matingsexual cannibalismweb-building spider

Yubing MA、Zeyuan HUA、Aijia MAO、Daiqin LI、Shichang ZHANG

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State Key Laboratory of Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering of China&Centre for Behavioral Ecology&Evolution,School of Life Sciences,Hubei University,Wuhan 430062,China

Department of Biological Sciences,National University of Singapore,Singapore 117543,Singapore

国家自然科学基金国家自然科学基金Singapore Ministry of Education(MOE)AcRF Tier 1 grant

NSFC-3180197931872229R-154-000-B18-114

2022

动物学报(英文版)
中国科学院动物研究所,中国动物学会

动物学报(英文版)

CSCDSCI
影响因子:0.198
ISSN:1674-5507
年,卷(期):2022.68(1)
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