Abstract
Predicting how insects will react to future thermal conditions requires understanding how temperature currently affects insect behavior, from performance traits to those involved in mating and reproduction. Many reproductive behaviors are thermally-sensitive, but little is known how temperature affects the behaviors used to find mates and coordinate mating. Here, we investigate how temperature influences courtship activity in two sympatric species of Enchenopa treehoppers (Hemiptera: Membracidae). Enchenopa use substrate-borne vibrational signals exchanged in male-female duets to facilitate pair formation prior to mating. In a controlled laboratory setting, we assessed the likelihood of males and females to produce courtship signals across a range of ecologically relevant temperatures. We found that changes in courtship activity across temperatures differed between the two species. We also found sex differences within species: in one species males were more likely to signal at higher temperatures, while in the other species females were more likely to signal at higher temperatures. Our results suggest that sex-specific responses to temperature may constrain mating to narrower ranges of temperatures. Furthermore, sympatric species may respond differently to changes in thermal variation despite sharing similar climactic history.
Highlights
Insect biomass is rapidly declining worldwide in the wake of global warming (Hallmann et al, 2017)
The data we present here includes an entirely new data set for E. binotata “V. prunifolium,” and data set from E. binotata “Ptelea” collected for a separate study conducted in the same year (Leith et al, in review) but significantly expanded for our current study
Male and female thermal courtship activity curves were more similar to each other in E. binotata “V. prunifolium” than in E. binotata “Ptelea.” We found that thermal activity peak was 4.4◦C higher in males vs. females in E. binotata “V. prunifolium,” while thermal activity window was barely 1◦C wider in females, yet thermal activity breadth was 3◦C wider in males than females (Table 4)
Summary
Insect biomass is rapidly declining worldwide in the wake of global warming (Hallmann et al, 2017). Rising temperatures pose a threat to insects because of the thermal sensitivity of a wide range of physiological, morphological, and behavioral traits (Kingsolver and Huey, 2008; Gibert et al, 2016; Abram et al, 2017). Many studies have focused on the thermal sensitivity of traits that are related to organismal performance, such as growth rates, heat shock, or flight performance (Deutsch et al, 2008; Frazier et al, 2008; King and MacRae, 2015). Temperature variation can affect activity levels related to courtship and the coordination of mating.
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