With significant surge of international trade in recent decades, increasingly more arthropod species have become established outside their natural range of distribution, causing enormous damage in their novel habitats. However, whether a species can colonize its new environment depends on its ability to overcome various barriers which may result in establishment failure, such as inbreeding depression and difficulty to find mates. Here, we used a haplodiploid pest, Tetranychus ludeni Zacher (Acari: Tetranychidae), which is native to Europe but now cosmopolitan, to investigate whether its reproductive strategies have facilitated its invasion success, providing knowledge to develop programs for prediction and management of biological invasions. We show that inbreeding had no negative influence on female reproductive outputs and longevity over 11 successive generations, allowing mother-son and brother-sister mating to occur at the invasion front without adverse consequences in fitness. Virgin females produced maximum number of sons in their early life to ensure subsequent mother-son mating but later saved resources to prolong longevity for potential future mating. Females maximized their resource allocation to egg production immediately after mating to secure production of maximum number of both daughters and sons as early as possible. Furthermore, mated females with mating delay increased proportion of daughters in offspring produced to compensate the loss of production of daughters during their virgin life. We suggest that the lack of inbreeding depression in successive generations and the ability to adjust resource allocations depending whether and when mating occurs may be the key features that have facilitated its invasion success.

中文翻译：

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可能有助于入侵成功的生殖策略：来自蜘蛛螨的证据

近几十年来，随着国际贸易的大幅增长，越来越多的节肢动物物种在其自然分布范围之外建立起来，对其新栖息地造成了巨大破坏。然而，一个物种能否在其新环境中定居取决于其克服各种障碍的能力，这些障碍可能导致建立失败，例如近交衰退和难以找到配偶。在这里，我们使用原产于欧洲但现在世界性的单倍体害虫 Tetranychus ludeni Zacher (Acari: Tetranychidae) 来调查其繁殖策略是否有助于其入侵成功，为开发预测和管理生物入侵的程序提供知识. 我们表明，近亲繁殖对连续 11 代的女性生殖产量和寿命没有负面影响，允许母子和兄弟姐妹交配发生在入侵前沿，而不会对健康产生不利影响。处女雌性在其早期生活中产生了最大数量的儿子，以确保随后的母子交配，但后来节省了资源以延长未来潜在交配的寿命。雌性在交配后立即最大限度地分配资源用于产卵，以确保尽可能早地生产最多数量的女儿和儿子。此外，交配延迟交配的雌性增加了后代中女儿的比例，以补偿女儿在处女生活期间的生产损失。