How Dietary Phosphorus Availability during Development Influences Condition and Life History Traits of the Cricket, Acheta domesticas

Phosphorus is extremely limited in the environment, often being 10–20 times lower in plants than what invertebrate herbivores require. This mismatch between resource availability and resource need can profoundly influence herbivore life history traits and fitness. This study investigated how dietary phosphorus availability influenced invertebrate growth, development time, consumption, condition, and lifespan using juvenile European house crickets, Acheta domesticus L. (Orthoptera: Gryllidae). Crickets reared on high phosphorus diets ate more food, gained more weight, were in better condition at maturity, and contained more phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon in their bodies at death than crickets reared on low phosphorus diets. There was also a trend for crickets reared on high phosphorus diets to become larger adults (interaction with weight prior to the start of the experiment). These findings can be added to the small but growing number of studies that reveal the importance of phosphorus to insect life history traits. Future research should explore the importance of dietary phosphorus availability relative to protein, lipid, and carbohydrate availability

Behavioral correlations across activity, mating, exploration, aggression, and antipredator contexts in the European house cricket, Acheta domesticus

Recently, there has been increasing interest in behavioral syndrome research across a range of taxa. Behavioral syndromes are suites of correlated behaviors that are expressed either within a given behavioral context (e. g., mating) or between different contexts (e. g., foraging and mating). Syndrome research holds profound implications for animal behavior as it promotes a holistic view in which seemingly autonomous behaviors may not evolve independently, but as a "suite" or "package." We tested whether laboratory-reared male and female European house crickets, Acheta domesticus, exhibited behavioral syndromes by quantifying individual differences in activity, exploration, mate attraction, aggressiveness, and antipredator behavior. To our knowledge, our study is the first to consider such a breadth of behavioral traits in one organism using the syndrome framework. We found positive correlations across mating, exploratory, and antipredatory contexts, but not aggression and general activity. These behavioral differences were not correlated with body size or condition, although age explained some of the variation in motivation to mate. We suggest that these across-context correlations represent a boldness syndrome as individual risk-taking and exploration was central to across-context mating and antipredation correlations in both sexes. © Springer-Verlag 2009

Phosphorus availability influences cricket mate attraction displays

Adopting a stoichiometric perspective (e.g. the balance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in organisms and their resources) has enhanced our understanding of ecological phenomena at a variety of hierarchical levels of organization. Unfortunately, little is presently known about how stoichiometry directly influences animal behaviour. Here we use a stoichiometric perspective to investigate how phosphorus availability in the environment influences mate attraction behaviour in insects. Using adult male European house crickets (Acheta domesticus), we manipulated the availability of dietary phosphorus and we quantified how survival, propensity to signal acoustically or not ('signallers' versus nonsignalling 'silent' males) and lifetime mate attraction signalling were affected. Dietary phosphorus availability did not influence the proportion of signallers versus silent males. However, signallers fed a diet rich in phosphorus had significantly higher signalling efforts than those that consumed a phosphorus-poor diet. Interestingly, signallers also lived longer than silent males, but neither signaller nor silent male survival was influenced by diet. Our findings suggest that the availability of dietary phosphorus has the potential to impact mating system evolution