Thurman Timothy J, Brodie Emily, Evans Elizabeth, McMillan William Owen
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Panama City Republic of Panama.
Department of Biology and Redpath Museum McGill University Montreal QC Canada.
Ecol Evol. 2018 Jan 13;8(3):1882-1889. doi: 10.1002/ece3.3624. eCollection 2018 Feb.
Mating systems have broad impacts on how sexual selection and mate choice operate within a species, but studies of mating behavior in the laboratory may not reflect how these processes occur in the wild. Here, we examined the mating behavior of the neotropical butterfly in the field by releasing larvae and virgin females and observing how they mated. is considered a pupal-mating species (i.e., males mate with females as they emerge from the pupal case). However, we observed only two teneral mating events, and experimentally released virgins were almost all mated upon recapture. Our study confirms the presence of some pupal-mating behavior in , but suggests that adult mating is likely the prevalent mating strategy in this species. These findings have important implications for the role of color pattern and female mate choice in the generation of reproductive isolation in this diverse genus.
交配系统对一个物种内性选择和配偶选择的运作方式有着广泛影响，但实验室中的交配行为研究可能无法反映这些过程在野外是如何发生的。在这里，我们通过释放幼虫和未交配过的雌性蝴蝶，并观察它们的交配方式，对新热带蝴蝶在野外的交配行为进行了研究。[该物种]被认为是一种蛹期交配的物种（即雄性在雌性从蛹壳中羽化出来时与其交配）。然而，我们仅观察到两起羽化初期的交配事件，并且实验中释放的未交配过的蝴蝶在重新捕获时几乎都已交配。我们的研究证实了[该物种]存在一些蛹期交配行为，但表明成虫交配可能是该物种中普遍的交配策略。这些发现对于色斑模式和雌性配偶选择在这个多样化属的生殖隔离形成中的作用具有重要意义。
