Optimal polyandry in fruit flies.

The study of polyandry has received increasing scientific attention with an emphasis on the fitness benefits and costs that females derive from mating with multiple males. There are still gaps in our understanding of how polyandry affects female fitness, however, as many previous studies compared the fitness outcomes of a single mating vs. two or three matings and did not separate the consequences of multiple mating from the costs of sexual harassment.

Sexual conflict and sexual networks in bed bugs: the fitness cost of traumatic insemination, female avoidance and male mate choice.

Sexual conflict is prevalent among animals and is primarily caused by the fact that the optimal mating rates are often higher in males than in females. While there is a growing appreciation that females can also gain from multiple matings, we still know relatively little about which sex controls the observed mating rates and how close it is to the optimal female mating rates. To address this issue, we tracked female bed bugs () inseminated daily versus weekly and found that weekly inseminated females lived longer and produced over 50% more offspring.

Sexual conflict and social networks in bed bugs: effects of social experience.

Living in groups can provide essential experience that improves sexual performance and reproductive success. While the effects of social experience have drawn considerable scientific interest, commonly used behavioral assays often do not capture the dynamic nature of interactions within a social group. Here, we conducted 3 experiments using a social network framework to test whether social experience during early adulthood improves the sexual competence of bed bugs () when placed in a complex and competitive group environment.

The genetic basis of variation in sexual aggression: Evolution versus social plasticity.

Male sexual aggression towards females is a form of sexual conflict that can result in increased fitness for males through forced copulations (FCs) or coercive matings at the cost of female lifetime fitness. We used male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) as a model system to uncover the genomic contributions to variation in FC, both due to standing variation in a wild population, and due to plastic changes associated with variation in social experience. We used RNAseq to analyse whole-transcriptome differential expression (DE) in male head tissue associated with evolved changes in FC from lineages previously selected for high and low FC rate and in male flies with varying FC rates due to social experience.

Artificial selection on sexual aggression: Correlated traits and possible trade-offs.

Forced copulation is an extreme form of sexual aggression that can affect the evolution of sex-specific anatomy, morphology, and behavior. To characterize mechanistic and evolutionary aspects of forced copulation, we artificially selected male fruit flies based on their ability to succeed in the naturally prevalent behavior of forced matings with newly eclosed (teneral) females. The low and high forced copulation lineages showed rapid divergence, with the high lineages ultimately showing twice the rates of forced copulation as the low lineages.