| Popis: |
Parasitic wasps have a wide range of specific developmental interactions with their hosts due to a close "parasitoid-host" relationship and that allows the study of many ecological and evolutionary questions. In our work, we focused on the parasitoid-host interactions in the parasitic wasp Anaphes flavipes (Förster, 1841) (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae). Because A. flavipes show a high variability of morphology and size, they have been repeatedly described as a new species in the past. Thus, we first redescribed the species and we compared the variability of some morphological structures for wasps from different localities (Paper 1). The high variability of the body size of wasps is reviewed in the second article, where we propose that females of A. flavipes do not decide according to the generally known "trade-off" scheme, if they will have more smaller offspring or fewer bigger offspring. In fact, the number of offspring depends on the body size of the female ("body size-fitness" hypothesis), which determines the variable reproductive strategies of mothers (the number of individuals that are laid into one host by a single female) (Paper 2). The third manuscript deals with the reproductive strategy of gregarious parasitoids. The reproductive strategy does not have to be stable; in the case of A... |
