Polyandry is context dependent but not convenient in a mostly monandrous wasp

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.12.001 0003-3472/© 2015 The Authors. Published on behalf license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Research over the past two decades suggests that polyandry is almost ubiquitous in nature. In some cases, females can gain direct and indirect (genetic) fitness benefits frommating with multiple males. However, when females accept superfluous matings without gaining any clear benefit, polyandry has been interpreted as a strategy tomitigate the costs of resisting or avoidingmatings, a situation known as convenience polyandry.When femalesmate out of ‘convenience’ themating rate is expected to be plastic, since females should mate at a higher rate when the costs of resistance or avoidance are high, for instance when males occur inhighdensities and/or around resources requiredby females such as oviposition sites.Hereweshow that remating in Nasonia vitripennis, a species of wasp that is largely monandrous in the wild but that evolves polyandry under laboratory culture, is dependent upon the availability of hosts for oviposition and uponmale density. We found that females mated at a higher rate whenmale density was high but only if a suitable oviposition substrate was available. Outwardly this seems suggestive of convenience polyandry. However, females that remated under these conditions did not gainmore time tooviposit than females that resisted superfluous matings. The results of this study highlight the importance of comprehensively assessing the costs and benefits of mating before attributing the observed behaviour to convenience polyandry. Furthermore, these results add to the growing body of evidence that the ecological context under which sexual interactions occur is critical to the economics of mating. © 2015 The Authors. Published on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).