Abstract
The presence of annual and biennial individuals within the same population has been recently demonstrated in the myrmecophilous butterflies Maculinea rebeli and Maculinea alcon, which present a cuckoo strategy inside Myrmica nests, and Maculinea arion which is a predatory species. Here, we present field and laboratory data on polymorphic larval growth in two other predatory species of Maculinea: M. teleius and M. nausithous. Body mass distributions of pre-pupation larvae were bimodal in both species. These results point to the existence of larvae that develop in 1 or 2 years. We also showed that the probability of pupation depended on larval body mass. In the case of M. teleius, the critical body mass at which larvae have a 50% probability of pupation is about 80 mg. We suggest that polymorphism in Maculinea may have evolved as an adaptation to life in ant nests, a habitat which protects them from predators and provides food. However, the quality of this resource is highly variable and unpredictable. According to the bet-hedging hypothesis, if the habitat is unpredictable, females should have an advantage by producing more variable offspring. In the case of Maculinea butterflies, this may involve maintaining larvae that develop in 1 or 2 years.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Karsten Schönrogge for his help with Macdonald’s optimisation routine analysis. Anna Amirowicz, Marta Wantuch and Kajetan Woyciechowski kindly assisted us with the fieldwork. Two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Specimens were collected with permission of the Polish Ministry of Environment. This study was financed by the EC within its RTD project EVK2-CT-2001-00126 as well as by the Polish Committee of Scientific Research by its grant SPUB-3024.
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Witek, M., Sliwinska, E.B., Skórka, P. et al. Polymorphic growth in larvae of Maculinea butterflies, as an example of biennialism in myrmecophilous insects. Oecologia 148, 729–733 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-006-0404-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-006-0404-5