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      Infanticide by a solitary koinobiont ichneumonid ectoparasitoid of spiders

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      Naturwissenschaften
      Springer Nature

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          Abstract

          When encountering an already parasitized host, a parasitoid's optimal choices (superparasitism, host rejection, host feeding or infanticide) seem to depend on the individual species' life history, because the same choice may have different fitness consequences. We demonstrate infanticide under laboratory conditions by a polysphinctine, Zatypota albicoxa, which is a solitary koinobiont ectoparasitoid of spiders. The female always removed any previously attached egg or larva from the body of the host spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, with a rubbing behaviour. She rubbed her ovipositor back and forth toward the undersurface of the attached egg or of the saddle under the attached larva to pry it off and laid an egg after removal. When removing a larva, the infanticidal female engaged exclusively in unfastening the 'saddle' which fastens the larva to the body of the spider. All larvae were removed with the 'saddle' attached to the ventral surface of the body. The female invested more time to remove the medium second and the large penultimate instar larvae than to remove eggs and first instar larvae because of the labour involved in unfastening the saddle. Oviposition with infanticide of the medium second and the penultimate instar larvae imposed more time upon the female than that on an unparasitized host. Removal of any previous occupant in spite of the associated labour costs suggests that infanticide will always be adaptive, no matter the time costs to Z. albicoxa, because so much is invested in attacking the host and because the parasitoid cannot detect whether the spider is already parasitized until she achieves subjugation.

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          Superparasitism as an adaptive strategy for insect parasitoids.

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            Phylogeny of the Polysphincta group of genera (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae; Pimplinae): a taxonomic revision of spider ectoparasitoids

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              Webs of theridiid spiders: construction, structure and evolution

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Naturwissenschaften
                Naturwissenschaften
                Springer Nature
                0028-1042
                1432-1904
                June 2011
                April 19 2011
                : 98
                : 6
                : 529-536
                Article
                10.1007/s00114-011-0797-9
                21503774
                ab837bab-5f33-4310-95b4-5babc894ad38
                © 2011
                History

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