Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 76, Issue 6, December 2008, Pages 1919-1926
Animal Behaviour

Factors affecting submerged oviposition in a water strider: level of dissolved oxygen and male presence

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.08.013Get rights and content

A large variation in dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration of water is expected to limit activities of semiaquatic insects, including submerged oviposition. Female water striders Aquarius paludum insularis (Heteroptera: Gerridae) perform submerged oviposition either in tandem pairs (with males on their backs) or singly. We allowed A. paludum females to oviposit in high- or low-DO water to examine the effects of DO concentration and the method of submersion (tandem pair or single female) on submerged oviposition. The duration of submersion and the number and depth of eggs oviposited were all greater in the high-DO water, but the females performed more bouts of submerged oviposition in the low-DO water. The duration of submersion was longer for tandem pairs than for single females in both the high- and low-DO water. In the high-DO water, the number and depth of eggs oviposited were greater for tandem pairs than for single females. The DO concentration did not affect the frequency of submerged oviposition by tandem pairs or by single females. We suggest that submerged oviposition with an accompanying male is beneficial for both sexes, because submersion is longer than for single females.

Section snippets

Materials

Adult A. paludum insularis were collected from Todoroki pond in Hisayama, Japan (33° 36′ 29″N, 130° 29′ 34E″) from 14 July to 26 September 2005. After measuring body size and recording sex and wing morph (short- or long-winged), we gave all the individuals a unique paint mark for subsequent identification (Opaque Color, Teranishi Chemical Industry, Osaka, Japan). Before and after the experiment, five to eight females and the same number of males were maintained in an aquarium (30 × 45 cm and 15 cm

Results

We used 512 male–female pairs of A. paludum for the experiment: 256 pairs each in high- and low-DO water. Of these, 59 pairs engaged in submerged oviposition in the high-DO water and 68 pairs in the low-DO water (Table 1). These 127 pairs were used in the subsequent analysis. During submerged oviposition by the tandem-pair method, nine males in the high-DO water and 15 males in the low-DO water floated to the surface independently, while their female partners continued to oviposit underwater.

Effects of Water DO Concentration

Our results on the mean duration of submersion suggest that oviposition bouts were shorter in the low-DO water, indicating that the duration of spontaneous submerged oviposition by A. paludum was affected by DO concentration. This result is consistent with that of Tsubaki et al. (2006) forced damselflies C. cornelia, into water and measured their potential for submergence. The present study is the first to demonstrate that the duration of spontaneous (not forced) submerged oviposition in

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to all our colleagues at our laboratory, for their help and encouragement. In particular, we thank Takashi Kuriwada and Gen Sakurai for their assistance and advice. We also thank Chris Wood for editing the manuscript. We also thank Jaco M. Greeff, Angela K. Turner and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

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