Behavioural Consistency in Female Resistance to Male Harassment in a Water Strider Species

Abstract

Sexual conflict over mating rate often implies that males persist at frequently harassing females to gain matings while females resist mating attempts. In water striders, females can resist by engaging in vigorous precopulatory struggles to dislodge males, but alternative means of resistance have seldom been investigated. Contrary to males, female resistance has not been investigated as a repeatable behaviour. We used Gerris buenoi to investigate the capacity to abbreviate struggles and the tendency to hide off the water as two potential female resistance traits. Specifically, we asked whether these behaviours are repeatable and whether they vary according to sexual conflict intensity and past mating experience. Also, we studied the possible connections between these behaviours and traits linked to fitness, namely endured harassment and mating activity. The capacity to abbreviate struggles was poorly repeatable and decreased with sexual conflict intensity and endured harassment. It seems to be mainly determined by the social environment and by recent events related to sexual conflict. The tendency to hide off the water was significantly repeatable across sexual conflict intensities and can be considered as a repeatable behaviour. Hiding frequently off the water allowed females to decrease the harassment endured by females and may enhance female fitness. In nature, hiding is more readily and more frequently observed than pre-copulatory struggles. Directly associating hiding off water with female fitness would confirm that this consistent phenotype contributes to sexually antagonistic female resistance.

An Inconvenient Truth: The Unconsidered Benefits of Convenience Polyandry

“…However, if we consider that mating is not the only way that females can limit harm induced by harassing males, then to demonstrate convenience polyandry it is necessary to test if (and when) it is more costly for a female to resist a mating than it is to accept it (criterion 2; Table 1). Alternatives to acquiescing to mating can include crypsis and androgyny, as seen in damselflies [25][26] or hiding, as seen in water striders [27].…”

“…The polyandry revolution has demonstrated that females are by no means passive players in sexually antagonistic co-evolution [23][24] and if they are able to escape harassment in less costly ways than by mating, then they will [25][26][27]. What is more, if indirect genetic benefits invariably follow from polyandry [17], such convenience polyandry, where the only benefit is cost mitigation, might be rare and fleeting.…”

A Holy Exchange: The Dedicatory Epistle of Clément Marot’s Translation of the Psalms

“…41 Désiré, in his Combatz du fidelle papiste, first accuses Marot of bastardizing the meaning of the psalm text: …si tresmal Marotté Que le sens du texte a osté Par un grand et scandaleux crime. 42 More importantly, though, this translation of the psalms acted as a vehicle for Protestant theology whose devotional character also posed a clear danger. The devotional use of the psalm translation reflected a developing Protestant liturgical identity that rejected Latin as a relic of a Catholic past.…”

“…39 Catholic authorities were perhaps justified in their suspicions about such projects, since Catholics took quite readily to using Marot's text, despite any potential dangers it may have posed or warnings they had received. 40 Attacks on Marot's translation from Catholic polemicists, such as Artus Désiré (1510-79), reflect a quite reasonable fear, but whether Marot was being ideological or not, these attacks indirectly confirm that what Marot seeks to do as outlined in his dedicatory epistle was perceived as being in sympathy with ideas of the Reformation. 41 Désiré, in his Combatz du fidelle papiste, first accuses Marot of bastardizing the meaning of the psalm text: …si tresmal Marotté Que le sens du texte a osté Par un grand et scandaleux crime.…”

Sexual conflict in its ecological setting

“…Thus, there is sexual conflict over mating (figure 1a), and encounters between the sexes often result in mating attempts by males and behavioural resistance to those attempts by females. Resistance behaviours include vigorous attempts to disengage from males and leaving the water surface [7,33]. In addition to female behavioural resistance, females of many Gerris species have sexually antagonistic morphological structures that include dorsal abdominal spines (figure 2) [34], and in G. gracilicornis, a modified pregenital segment that covers the genital opening [35].…”