Abstract
The use of chemical cues and signals is essential for communication in insects. Wasps of the genus Nasonia (Hymenoptera, Pteromalidae) are gregarious parasitoids that lay their eggs into puparia of cyclorrhaphous flies. During their life cycle, various kinds of semiochemicals are used: (1) a male abdominal sex pheromone that attracts females and induces site fidelity in males, (2) a female-derived contact sex pheromone eliciting courtship behavior in males, (3) an oral male aphrodisiac eliciting receptivity signaling in females and causing a switch in the females' olfactory preferences, (4) chemicals derived from host habitat and host puparia used in olfactory host finding by female wasps, and (5) chemicals used by females to assess the quality and parasitization status of potential hosts. We review the literature on the chemical ecology of Nasonia spp. following the wasps' life cycle from emergence to oviposition. We depict biosynthetic pathways where available, discuss ecological implications, highlight differences among Nasonia species, summarize insights into their olfactory perception and associative learning abilities, and point out gaps in our understanding of the chemical ecology of these parasitoids to be addressed in future studies.
Highlights
Chemicals are highly important to insect life enabling them to locate food and prey, to find, recognize and evaluate potential mating partners, to mediate the complex interactions in societies as well as to avoid natural enemies and suboptimal living conditions (Cardé and Baker, 1984; Symonds and Elgar, 2008; Wyatt, 2014)
Since the identification of bombykol, the sex pheromone used by females of the silkworm moth Bombyx mori for long-range attraction of males (Butenandt et al, 1959), and the following establishment of the field of chemical ecology in the early 1960s, particular focus has been laid, among other topics, on the identification of chemical cues and signals used by insects to find mating partners and locate adequate foraging, and oviposition sites (Greenfield, 1981; Cardé and Baker, 1984; Renwick, 1989; Landolt, 1997; Pichersky and Gershenzon, 2002; Wyatt, 2014)
Studies on semiochemicals used by Nv have revealed pheromones and allelochemicals which are highly important for the wasps in almost all stages of their life: males use sex pheromones to scent mark territories and arrest females after emergence from the host (e.g., Ruther et al, 2007)
Summary
Chemicals are highly important to insect life enabling them to locate food and prey, to find, recognize and evaluate potential mating partners, to mediate the complex interactions in societies as well as to avoid natural enemies and suboptimal living conditions (Cardé and Baker, 1984; Symonds and Elgar, 2008; Wyatt, 2014). Since the identification of bombykol, the sex pheromone used by females of the silkworm moth Bombyx mori for long-range attraction of males (Butenandt et al, 1959), and the following establishment of the field of chemical ecology in the early 1960s, particular focus has been laid, among other topics, on the identification of chemical cues and signals used by insects to find mating partners and locate adequate foraging, and oviposition sites (Greenfield, 1981; Cardé and Baker, 1984; Renwick, 1989; Landolt, 1997; Pichersky and Gershenzon, 2002; Wyatt, 2014). Nasonia wasps are easy to breed in the lab, easy to handle and due to their phylogenetic species structure and distribution pattern (differently related species occurring in sympatry and allopatry; Figure 1) form an exceptional model system for the study of the evolution of species-specific chemical communication and other reproductive isolation mechanisms. The availability of the whole genome sequences (Werren et al, 2010) and the growing molecular toolbox for the Nasonia species (Lynch and Desplan, 2006; Lynch, 2015; Li et al, 2017) open up valuable opportunities to investigate biosynthetic pathways in detail and get new insights into insect chemical perception in general, both of which are fundamental for the understanding of the evolutionary processes shaping chemical communication in nature
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