Females Receive a Life-Span Benefit From Male Ejaculates in a Field Cricket

Abstract

Abstract. Mating has been found to be costly for females of some species because of toxic products that males transfer to females in their seminal fluid. Such mating costs seem paradoxical, particularly for species in which females mate more frequently than is necessary to fertilize their eggs. Indeed, some studies suggest that females may benefit from mating more frequently. The effect of male ejaculates on female life span and lifetime fecundity was experimentally tested in the variable field cricket, Gryllus lineaticeps. In field crickets, females will mate repeatedly with a given male and mate with multiple males. Females that were experimentally mated either repeatedly or multiply lived more than 32% longer than singly mated females. In addition, multiply mated females produced 98% more eggs than singly mated females. Because females received only sperm and seminal fluid from males in the experimental matings, these life-span and fecundity benefits may result from beneficial seminal fluid products that males transfer to females during mating. Mating benefits rather than mating costs may be common in many animals, particularly in species where female mate choice has a larger effect on male reproductive success than does the outcome of sperm competition.

Pre-winter copulation enhances overwintering success of Orius females (Heteroptera: Anthocoridae)

“…Such nutrient donation reduces the survival of copulated males (Shapiro, 1982;Koshiyama et al, 1997b). Life-span benefits for copulated females of a bruchid beetle Callosobruchus maculatus (Fabricius) (Fox, 1993) and a cricket Gryllus lineaticeps Stål (Wagner et al, 2001) are likely reaped from male-derived nutrients, and the effect is speculated to be increased via accumulation through repeated copulation; however, in Orius species, no evidence indicated that males donate nutrients to females through copulation, and we did not find a cost of pre-winter copulation for males. Moreover, the overwintering success of multiple-copulated females was not higher than that of once-copulated females.…”

Determinants of female fecundity in a simultaneous hermaphrodite: the role of polyandry and food availability

“…Furthermore, the receipt of sperm can represent a material benefit, if female reproductive success is limited by the number of sperm that is available to fertilize all the eggs (e.g., Pitnick 1993; Levitan and Petersen 1995;Fjerdingstad and Boomsma 1998;Diaz et al 2010). Several empirical studies across a wide range of taxa have demonstrated that repeated matings are advantageous to females (e.g., Wagner et al 2001;Fedorka and Mousseau 2002;Schwartz and Peterson 2006;Klemme et al 2007), which suggests that direct benefits may promote the evolution of multiple mating. Likewise, a meta-analysis of 122 studies focussing on female fitness consequences of multiple mating indicated that direct benefits alone can explain the evolutionary maintenance of multiple mating in insects (Arnqvist and Nilsson 2000).…”

Sexual Conflict and Cryptic Female Choice in the Black Field Cricket, Teleogryllus Commodus

“…However, the extent to which such biased insemination arises via indirect selection for genetic benefits rather than direct selection for food acquisition is not clear (Gwynne 2001;Bussière 2002). In field crickets, where spermatophores are not associated with large nutritional donations (but see Wagner et al 2001), the evidence for CFC is more equivocal, especially when one considers the probable publication bias against negative results. In most cases the phenotypes favored by females are unknown (Fleischman and Sakaluk 2004) or attractiveness is imperfectly associated with individual features (e.g., size) of the male phenotype (Simmons 1987a).…”