The repeatability of mating failure in a polyandrous bug
Abstract
Mating failure, characterised by the lack of production of offspring following copulation, is relatively common across taxa yet is little understood. It is unclear if mating failures are stochastic occurrences between incompatible mating partners or represent a persistent, meaningful phenotype on the part of one or other sex. Here we test this in the seed bug Lygaeus simulans, by sequentially mating families of males with randomly-allocated unrelated females and calculating the repeatability of mating outcome for each individual male and family. Mating outcome is significantly repeatable within individual males but not across full-sib brothers. We conclude that mating failure represents a consistent male-associated phenotype with low heritability in this species, affected by as yet undetermined environmental influences on males.
Citation
Greenway , E V & Shuker , D M 2015 , ' The repeatability of mating failure in a polyandrous bug ' , Journal of Evolutionary Biology , vol. 28 , no. 8 , pp. 1578-1582 . https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.12678
Publication
Journal of Evolutionary Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1010-061XType
Journal article
Rights
© 2015 The Authors. Journal of Evolutionary Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Society for Evolutionary Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: NERC DTG ABE1-NERC13Collections
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