Facultative Sex Ratio Adjustment in Natural Populations of Wasps: Cues of Local Mate Competition and the Precision of Adaptation

Sex ratio theory offers excellent opportunities to examine the extent to which individuals adaptively adjust their behavior in response to local conditions. Hamilton’s theory of local mate competition, which predicts female‐biased sex ratios in structured populations, has been extended in numerous d...

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Published in:The American naturalist 2008-09, Vol.172 (3), p.393-404
Main Authors: Burton‐Chellew, Maxwell N., Koevoets, Tosca, Grillenberger, Bernd K., Sykes, Edward M., Underwood, Sarah L., Bijlsma, Kuke, Gadau, Juergen, Zande, Louis van de, Beukeboom, Leo W., West, Stuart A., Shuker, David M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation, Physiological
Animal and plant ecology
Animal populations
Animal reproduction
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Animals
Biological and medical sciences
Clutch size
Competitive Behavior
Eggs
Fecundity
Female
Female animals
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Hymenoptera
Insects
Male
Mating behavior
Microsatellite Repeats
Modeling
Models, Biological
Nasonia vitripennis
Oviposition
Parasite hosts
Parasitism
Sex allocation
Sex Ratio
Wasps - physiology
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Summary:Sex ratio theory offers excellent opportunities to examine the extent to which individuals adaptively adjust their behavior in response to local conditions. Hamilton’s theory of local mate competition, which predicts female‐biased sex ratios in structured populations, has been extended in numerous directions to predict individual behavior in response to factors such as relative fecundity, time of oviposition, and relatedness between cofoundresses and between mates. These extended models assume that foundresses use different sources of information, and they have generally been untested or have only been tested in the laboratory. We use microsatellite markers to describe the wild oviposition behavior of individual foundresses in natural populations of the parasitoid waspNasonia vitripennis,and we use the data collected to test these various models. The offspring sex ratio produced by a foundress on a particular host reflected the number of eggs that were laid on that host relative to the number of eggs that were laid on that host by other foundresses. In contrast, the offspring sex ratio was not directly influenced by other potentially important factors, such as the number of foundresses laying eggs on that patch, relative fecundity at the patch level, or relatedness to either a mate or other foundresses on the patch.
ISSN:0003-0147
1537-5323
DOI:10.1086/589895