30.5  Friday, Jan. 4  The impact of age and mate quality on resource allocation in the house cricket, Acheta domesticus MURPHY, K.K*; WALKER, S.E. ; California State University, Fullerton kerimurphy@csu.Fullerton.edu

Sexual conflict occurs when the interests of males and females diverge and the sexes have evolved tactics that manipulate the other sex in order to increase their immediate reproductive success. These tactics can be plastic and vary with individual quality. Organisms are faced with a tradeoff between allocating resources to somatic maintenance or reproduction. The balance of this trade of may be impacted by the quality of an individual’s mate and age at first reproduction. However, few studies have examined how mate quality and age impact reproductive decisions. Reproductive allocation varies with age, mating status and mate quality. Two hypotheses try to explain how mate attractiveness affects reproductive allocation. Reproductive compensation (RC) predicts a female will allocate more resources towards reproduction when her mate is unattractive. Differential allocation (DA) predicts females will allocate more resources when her mate is attractive. We sought to determine which strategy of reproductive allocation is used by house crickets, Acheta domesticus, how it varies with age and if females have higher fitness when young and mated to an unattractive male, or older and mated to an attractive male. Older females lay fewer eggs than young females. Regardless of age, female house crickets mated to unattractive males have higher initial rates of egg production compared to females mated to attractive males. Hatching rates don’t vary with female age or male attractiveness. However, fertilization rates were highest in young females mated with attractive males and lowest for old females mated with attractive males suggesting attractive males may vary their reproductive investment in response to female age but unattractive males do not. Clearly, house crickets do not strictly adhere to either DA or RC and both male and female strategies vary depending on the context.