Impacts of diet quality on life‐history and reproductive traits in male and female armed beetle, Gnatocerus cornutus

Abstract

1. The energy available for reproduction is usually limited by resource acquisition (i.e. condition). Because condition is known to be strongly affected by environmental factors, reproductive investments also vary across heterogeneous environments.2. Although the condition dependence of reproductive investment is common to both sexes, reproductive traits may exhibit sexually different responses to environmental fluctuation due to sex‐specific life‐history strategies. However, few direct experimental studies have investigated the condition dependence of reproductive investments in both sexes.3. We investigated the condition dependence of life‐history and reproductive traits of males and females in the beetle Gnatocerus cornutus Fabricus by manipulating larval and adult diet quality. We found that male and female life‐history traits exhibited similar responses to environmental fluctuations.4. By contrast, the sexes exhibit different patterns of condition dependence in reproductive traits (i.e. the adult nutritional environment has a strong impact on the female lifetime reproductive success, whereas larval nutritional environment strongly affects the secondary sexual trait in males).5. This difference in the plasticity of reproductive traits may lead to different selection pressures for each sex, even if both sexes develop and/or live in the same environment.