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Male opportunistic mating increases with intensity of female sexual cannibalism in 3 web-building spiders

Sexual conflict is common in animals, and female sexual cannibalism represents an extreme form of sexual conflict. Males in many species have evolved a variety of strategies to circumvent or decrease the risk of female sexual cannibalism. Opportunistic mating, by which a male mates with a female whe...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ma (马玉冰), Yubing, Hua (华泽远), Zeyuan, Mao (毛艾佳), Aijia, Li (李代芹), Daiqin, Zhang (张士昶), Shichang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8836337/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35169634
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cz/zoab090
Descripción
Sumario:Sexual conflict is common in animals, and female sexual cannibalism represents an extreme form of sexual conflict. Males in many species have evolved a variety of strategies to circumvent or decrease the risk of female sexual cannibalism. Opportunistic mating, by which a male mates with a female when she is disturbed or when she is feeding or undertaking moulting, is one of such kinds of strategies, and widely occurs in many animals, especially in spiders. However, whether the occurrence of male opportunistic mating depends on the intensity of female sexual cannibalism remains largely unexplored. We predicted a positive correlation between them. In this study, we tested this prediction by performing a series of mating trials in the laboratory using 3 species of web-building spiders with different intensities of female sexual cannibalism: Nephila pilipes, Nephilengys malabarensis, and Parasteatoda tepidariorum. We found that the occurrence of male opportunistic mating was positively, though not statistically significantly, correlated with the intensity of female sexual cannibalism, thus supporting our hypothesis. All together, we provide evidence that male opportunistic mating may have evolved to respond to the selection pressure posed by female sexual cannibalism.