Mating Stacks! Wasp Competitive Mating, Part 2!!

Well, today was a Monday, and as of last week, that means MATING OBSERVATIONS!!! The boldness and redness of that text should illustrate how frustrating it all is. Similarly to last week, our precious little wasps had a hard time getting on to the leaf dish, and this time, that problem was compounded by the threat of drowning...

So, if you'll recall, the mating observations we're doing this week involve two males and one female in something we like to call "competitive mating." Ideally, we place the female wasp on first, and then we add the two males onto the dish, and hope that something interesting happens. Often enough, something interesting does happen, namely, the mating stack, where the two males wrestle each other for access to the female, while actually on the female's back. Frequently, the stack falls over and the female leaves the two warring males alone to fight it out, but not uncommonly, one male will mate with the female, then be interrupted and replaced by the second male, who will also mate, but actually perform postcopulatory behavior, uninterrupted. The postcopulatory behavior, as it turns out, is quite an important part of the Eretmocerus emiratus mating process, since it allows the male to "mark" the female with his scent, thereby telling the other males that she's taken and can't be mated with anymore. When postcopulatory behavior is interrupted, other males can, and will try to mate with the already mated female.

More mating observations will happen tomorrow. Later in the week, we should be doing DNA extractions on some of our unexamined males from last week, and we should also be sequencing the genome of Encarsia inaron wasps (unrelated to my experiment), in order to be sure that the cultures at the lab are indeed accurately labeled. Shouldn't be a difficult week, but it should be a fun one!!!