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

作　　者：Yubing MA Zeyuan HUA Aijia MAO Daiqin LI Shichang ZHANG 马玉冰;华泽远;毛艾佳;李代芹;张士昶(State Key Laboratory of Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering of China&Centre for Behavioral Ecology&Evolution,School of Life Sciences,Hubei University,Wuhan 430062,China;Department of Biological Sciences,National University of Singapore,Singapore 117543,Singapore)

机构地区：[1]State Key Laboratory of Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering of China&Centre for Behavioral Ecology&Evolution,School of Life Sciences,Hubei University,Wuhan 430062,China [2]Department of Biological Sciences,National University of Singapore,Singapore 117543,Singapore

出　　处：《Current Zoology》2022年第1期113-119,共7页动物学报（英文版）

基　　金：This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC-31801979 and 31872229);the Singapore Ministry of Education(MOE)AcRF Tier 1 grant(R-154-000-B18-114).

摘　　要：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.

关 键 词：opportunistic mating sexual cannibalism web-building spider 

分 类 号：Q95[生物学—动物学]