Bedtime Story to My Mother: Virgin Females Seek Love
Marc Rhainds

TL;DR
This study explores how virgin female bagworms seek mates in different species and environments, focusing on their mating success and timing.
Contribution
The study introduces neotenic female bagworms as a model system to better understand reproductive processes in insects with complete metamorphosis.
Findings
Calling females are long-lived relative to males and mate when male abundance is high.
Low mating success occurs during early season male shortages or late adult emergence in northern populations.
Synchronous larval development leads to a decline in live calling females over time in all three species.
Abstract
In organisms with obligatory sexual reproduction, females are born virgin and need to access male sperm over the course of their life to produce offspring. This problem is simplified in holometabolous insects with complete metamorphosis because food acquisition and sexual activities are segregated into separate life history phases (transition between larval, pupal, and adult stages). Unfortunately, female transition from virgin to mated status in feral populations is challenging to quantify due to the high mobility, small size, and cryptic nature of adult insects. Neotenic female bagworms reproduce within a self-constructed bag, thus providing a model system to parameterize reproductive processes. The probability that female bagworms (Lepidoptera: Psychidae) are in mating time-in (live pheromone calling) was recorded in three bagworm species: Oiketicus kirbyi in a Costa Rican oil palm…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInsect Pheromone Research and Control · Date Palm Research Studies · Lepidoptera: Biology and Taxonomy
