Attraction to conspecific eggs may guide oviposition site selection in a solitary insect

Jani Raitanen, Jukka T. Forsman, Sami M. Kivelä, Maarit I. Mäenpää and Panu Välimäki

Behavioral Ecology, 2014, vol. 25, issue 1, 110-116

Abstract: Conspecific attraction is a form of social information use whereby individuals are attracted to the presence of conspecifics because they may indicate high-quality sites or resources. Conspecific attraction results in aggregation of individuals with similar needs and may therefore intensify competition, in particular, at high densities. Thus, the occurrence and strength of conspecific attraction may be dependent on density, but the effects of predicted intensity of future competition for resources on individual decisions have rarely been quantified. We studied realized early fecundity and oviposition site selection in the butterfly Pieris napi in relation to a density gradient of conspecific eggs on available host plants in an explicit laboratory experiment. Relying on conspecific assessment of host quality is expected to select for conspecific attraction, whereas competition avoidance is expected to select for avoidance of high conspecific densities. Presence of conspecific cues did not substantially affect realized fecundity as females exposed to an environment containing conspecific cues laid approximately equal number of eggs as females exposed to an environment lacking such cues. Instead, when females were able to choose among host plants with or without previously laid conspecific eggs, they preferred plants that already carried eggs in relation to egg-free host plants, independently of the initial egg density. Indeed, the maintenance of conspecific attraction, rather than avoidance, in P. napi implies that the possible benefits of conspecific attraction in oviposition site selection may outweigh the costs of competition in the wild.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/art092 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:25:y:2014:i:1:p:110-116.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().