Abstract
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.
基金项目
国家自然科学基金(NSFC-31801979)
国家自然科学基金(31872229)
Singapore Ministry of Education(MOE)AcRF Tier 1 grant(R-154-000-B18-114)
维普
万方数据