New Horizons in Insect Science Towards Sustainable Pest Management

36 S. Singh

In Adalia bipunctata (coleopteran) and Ephestia
kuehniella (lepidopteran), melanics display high-
er mating success compared with typicals (Ver-
hoog et al. 1998 ). However, less attention has
been paid to most visible body colour variations
(Hirai et al. 1999 ; Brakefield 1984 ) which show
pleiotropic effects on mating behaviour (True
2003 ). A few recent studies have shown the pos-
sible consequences of changes in body melanisa-

tion for fitness traits in drosophilids (Rajpurohit

et al. 2008 ; Singh et al. 2009 ; Parkash et al. 2011 ;

Dev et al. 2013 ). However, there is no detailed

study that has considered the impact of changes

in body size as well as body melanisation simul-

taneously on mating success in Drosophila spe-

cies.

In diverse insect taxa, pleiotropic effects of

body melanization have been observed for vari-

Me

lanisation

( %

)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

a ControlDSS LSS

Ma

ting

latenc

y ( mi

nute

s )

0

4

8

12

16

20

24

c ControlDSS LSS

Wi

ng

leng

th (m

m)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

b ControlDSS LSS

Co

pul

ation dura

tion

( mi

nute

s )

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

d ControlDSS LSS

Fig. 4 Results of laboratory selected dark (DSS) and light strains (LSS) (a) of D. immigrans on body size ( wing length)
(b), mating latency (c), and copulation duration (d). Darker (DSS) and lighter (LSS) selected strains vary in mating
success but not in body size in D. immigrans. Trait values for control ( base) population are also shown