Mating territories

All of the suborder Symphyta and many species in the superfamily Aculeata in the suborder Apocrita are solitary insects. Although not requiring the complex semiochemistry of parasitic or social insects, solitary insects employ pheromones for mating, territorial marking, and host marking. Unfortunately, very few of these have been chemically identified. The pheromones of sawflies and seed wasps were extensively reviewed in 1999 [ 14]. The semiochemicals recently identified in solitary hymenoptera, discussed below, are summarized in Table 2 and Fig. 1. 

As far as we have been able to determine, there exists only one convincing published example among insects of chemical repulsion of males by an intra-sexual occupying a mating territory. 

Signals that have evolved through sexual selection are either designed to attract the opposite sex, or to intimidate rivals of the same sex. Males often compete with each other for access to limited or valuable territories, food or mates, and have been shown to use signals that communicate their... 

Wolfenbarger, L. L. 1999a. Red coloration of male northern cardinals correlates with mate quality and territory quality. Behav. Ecol. 10 80-90. 

Changing the diet of a fish may change the behavior of conspecifics it interacts with subsequently. For instance, if one of a pair of male brown bullhead, I. nebulosus (a catfish), is removed from the tank and fed beef liver instead of the usual trout chow and then returned to his partner in their original tank, the resident will behave differently than if the same male is reintroduced without a diet change. The former tank mate is now a chemical stranger. The behavior changes include loss of territory and more activity by the smaller, manipulated fish and more aggression and activity by the resident fish. These diet-dependent odors are not specialized pheromones, and yet they are probably important social chemical cues in the natural territorial and dominance behavior of bullhead catfish. Body odor is the more appropriate term (Bryant and Atema, 1987). 

Ecologically, female meadow voles are territorial, know their neighbors, and are more tolerant of each other. They exemplify the dear enemy concept familiar neighbors reduce aggression toward one another because they pose less threat to each other than newcomers without a territoiy, who might compete for territory, mates, or resources. Males are dispersal prone, and neighbor relations are more ephemeral. Each male s home range overlaps with those of several females (Ferkin, 1988). 

In lek species, the male s mating success can depend upon female odors, which attract the females to males. In both Uganda kob Kobus kob thomasi) and Kafue lechwe Kobus leche kafuensis), males attract estrous females to small breeding territories within a lek. Mating success of a male is site specific it is predicted by the success of the previous occupant of the same territory and not by... 

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