Biodemography of a long-lived tephritid: Reproduction and longevity in a large cohort of female Mexican fruit flies,

Abstract

Age of sexual maturity, daily and lifetime reproductive rates, and life span were recorded in a laboratory cohort of Mexican fruit flies consisting of over 1100 females maintained individually. The results revealed that, relative to the medfly, the Mexfly is slower maturing (14 vs 17 days), more fecund (1400 vs 650-1100 eggs/female), and longer lived (50 vs 35 days). The results reinforced the generality of several earlier findings on the medfly including the deceleration of mortality at older ages and the weakness of the correlation between the rate of egg laying at early ages and both subsequent reproduction and remaining longevity. Discussion includes perspectives on the role of artificial selection in shaping the demographic traits of the mass-reared strain of Mexfly used in this study, as well as the overall significance of large scale biodemographic studies in understanding aging and longevity.

The Quest for Immortality in Triatomines: A Meta-Analysis of the Senescence Process in Hemimetabolous Hematophagous Insects

“…Mortality rate stays very low during most of the juvenile stages (except in the egg stage for some species) and during the first part of adult stage, and then increases greatly in the old ages in most species. This senescence pattern observed in triatomine species are in contrast with patterns reported for various Diptera: Drosophila melanogaster (Curtsinger et al, 1992;Pletcher & Curtsinger, 1998), Ceratitis capitata (Carey et al, 1992(Carey et al, , 1998, Anastrepha ludens (Carey et al, 2005), and Aedes aegypti (Styer et al, 2007).…”

“…So a comparative approach focused on the frequency of senescence in closely related species may contribute to our knowledge of the senescence process. Comparative studies in insects are scarce as compared to mammals and birds; within the insects, demographic analyses of senescence have been carried out mainly for the Diptera (Styer et al, 2007;Curtsinger et al, 1992;Carey et al, 1992Carey et al, , 2005Fukui et al, 1993), and the Coleoptera (Tatar et al, 1993), and very few studies have considered hemimetabolous species (Dingle, 1966, Chaves et al, 2004a,b, Rabinovich et al, 2010.…”

Comparative approaches to facilitate the discovery of prolongevity interventions: Effects of tocopherols on lifespan of three invertebrate species

“…Large-scale cultivation of A. ludens Mexican fruit flies has greatly facilitated demographic studies of aging in this species (Carey et al, 2005). For lifespan assays, both males and females were housed together, which allowed mating and reproduction throughout the treatment.…”

“…Subsequently flies were separated by sex and transferred to vials containing SY medium and various concentrations of tocopherols for lifespan experiments. The lifespan assays for A. ludens were conducted in population cages (Carey et al, 2005). Each cage housed approximately 2000 adult flies with roughly equal number of males and females.…”

Growth and Development of <i>Acanthiophilus helianthi</i> (Diptera: Tephritidae) Feeding on Safflower, <i>Carthamus tinctorius</i>

“…Colonies of A. helianthi were reared by using techniques adopted and modified from Chua (1991), Vargas et al (2000), Kaspi et al (2001), Carey et al (2005), Hee and Tan (2006), Chuang and Hou (2008) and Wang et al (2009). Fifty rotten flower heads of safflower were collected randomly from the farm of Agricultural Research Station in Gachsaran (N 50 30' E 100 50').…”