Ecological Entomology (2012) 37, 480-489

Isabelle Amat, Sebastien Besnard, Vincent Foray, Perrine Pelosse, Carlos Bernstein and Emmanuel Desouhant (2012)
Fuelling flight in a parasitic wasp: which energetic substrate to use?
Ecological Entomology 37 (6), 480-489
Abstract: 1. Flight is an energy-demanding behaviour in insects. In parasitic wasps, strategies of nutrient acquisition and allocation, resulting life-history trade-offs and relationships with foraging strategies and resource availability have received much attention. However, despite the ecological importance of dispersal between host and food patches, and the great impact energy diverted to flight should have on lifetime reproductive success, the eco-physiology of flight in parasitoids is poorly understood.
2. The objective of this study is to (i) identify the energetic resources used to fuel flight, and (ii) relate nutrient type and rate of utilisation to selective pressures in terms of resource availability posed by the environment.
3. Using a flight mill and biochemical assays, we compared flight performance and nutrient dynamics during flight between two reproductive modes of the parasitoid Venturia canescens Gravenhorst, which is known to thrive preferentially in contrasted environments (i.e. natural vs. anthropogenic habitat), differing notably in host and food distribution.
4. Biochemical analyses of different nutrient types showed that glycogen is the flight fuel used by this species, yet no significant differences in its dynamics in flight were found between the two reproductive modes.
5. Results suggest that both glycogen quantity and flight performance are related to the diverging ecological conditions experienced by thelytokous and arrhenotokous strains.
(The abstract is excluded from the Creative Commons licence and has been copied with permission by the publisher.)
Link to article at publishers website
Database assignments for author(s): Emmanuel Desouhant

Research topic(s) for pests/diseases/weeds:
biocontrol - natural enemies
Research topic(s) for beneficials or antagonists:
general biology - morphology - evolution
molecular biology - genes

---

Pest and/or beneficial records:

Beneficial	Pest/Disease/Weed	Crop/Product	Country	Quarant.
Venturia canescens (parasitoid)