Female crickets are driven to fight by the male courting and calling songs
Crickets have traditional sex roles, where males compete aggressively for access to selective polyandrous females. However, in a laboratory experiment, we found that normally nonaggressive female Gryllus campestris fought each other vigorously in the presence of a courting male, resulting in a dominant female that gained a greater probability of receiving the spermatophore. Female-female fights […]
Warm and cozy: temperature and predation risk interactively affect oviposition site selection
Because reproductive decision making affects all taxa, parents often use environmental cues to optimize their decisions. Although prefertilization decisions (e.g. mate choice) are well studied, postfertilization decisions, such as oviposition site selection (OSS), can also have profound effects on parent and offspring fitness. We used the Texas field cricket, Gryllus texensis, to examine how OSS […]