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Aggression and Mating Behavior in Wild and Captive Populations of the House Cricket, Acheta domesticus

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Abstract

Animals in captivity experience drastically different selective pressures than their wild counterparts. This can cause evolutionary divergence in behavior between captive and wild populations. While most research on evolution under captivity has focused on vertebrates, we expect similar behavioral changes in insects that live and breed in commercial facilities. Using the common house cricket, Acheta domesticus, we tested how crickets reared in captivity for many generations differed from wild-caught counterparts in two aspects of social behavior: male aggression and female responsiveness to male calling song. Acheta domesticus is an important model organism for behavioral research and are often reared in dense, commercial facilities with ad-libitum access to food and no risk of mortality from predators— very different conditions from the wild. We predicted that commercially-derived males would exhibit less intrasexual aggression due to selection from living in dense conditions. We predicted that commercially-derived females would be less responsive to male calling song because they are more likely to encounter many males at random. Instead, we found that commercially-derived males were more aggressive than wild ones, and that commercially-derived and wild females did not differ in responsiveness to calling song. Insects serve as model systems for a great deal of research in evolutionary and behavioral biology. If these animals are evolving in captivity, they may not provide an accurate representation of the natural phenomena we aim to understand.

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Data Availability

The raw data for this study can be found in the Mendeley Data repository (https://doi.org/10.17632/mhnvkd54cx.1).

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Gray from California State University, Northridge for providing us with a wild population of crickets; and Vance Noland from Fluker’s Cricket Farm for providing valuable information about their commercial facility. This work was made possible through partial financial support from the National Science Foundation. This work was also supported by University of Minnesota Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program awards to N. Deak and X. Tan. Sincere gratitude to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Program, administered by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for their support of R. Olzer.

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  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Falcon Heights, MN, 55108, USA

    Rachel Olzer, Nicola Deak, Xinci Tan, Justa L. Heinen-Kay & Marlene Zuk

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  1. Rachel Olzer
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  2. Nicola Deak
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Correspondence to Rachel Olzer.

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Olzer, R., Deak, N., Tan, X. et al. Aggression and Mating Behavior in Wild and Captive Populations of the House Cricket, Acheta domesticus. J Insect Behav 32, 89–98 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-019-09715-y

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