Dear colleagues,
Biology Thursday seminar continues on 12th May, 12:15
Join the Zoom Meeting
https://oulu.zoom.us/j/62917763539?pwd=WENZRy9Bb3NlSzlyeVlVamJ4RHR5Zz09
Arja Kaitala from University of Oulu will present her research on:
How to be attractive? Social and visual environment affect female success in glow-worms
Sexual signaling is widely studied in males but costs and benefits of female signaling are not well established. In the common European glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca, flightless females glow to attract flying males. Adults
do not eat and females have limited energy for activities. They may loose eggs every night they remain unmated and thus should mate soon. Males select the brightest female if females are close to each other. However, individual females avoid competition by
moving apart and glow like twinkling stars far from each other. To stand out from the environment females often glow in open habitats to increase visibility. They choose the habitat daytime during the final larval stage. This dispersal may have dramatic consequences
in urban areas as larvae often use roads as dispersal routes and are killed by cars. Females are expected to avoid bright summer nights. Surprisingly, at the northern range of the distribution females glow around midsummer when nights are lightest. To increase
visibility, northern females grow larger and glow brighter.
Related research:
Borshagovski et al. 2020. When night never falls: female sexual signalling in a nocturnal insect along a latitudinal gradient. Behav Ecol Sociobiol.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-020-02927-9
Hopkins et al. 2021. Costly mating delays drive female ornamentation in a capital breeder. Ecol Evol.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.7719
Lehtonen et al. 2021 High road mortality during female-biased larval dispersal in an iconic beetle. Behav Ecol Sociobiol.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-020-02962-6
See you online on Thursday!
Noémie
Noémie Pichon
Post-doctoral researcher
University of Oulu, Finland