The Nature and Development of Sex Attractant Specificity in Cockroaches of the Genus Periplaneta Ill. NORMAL INTRA- AND INTERSPECIFIC BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES AND RESPONSES OF INSECTS WITH JUVENILE HORMONE-ALTERED ANTENNAE

Male cockroaches of the species Periplaneta americana rely on a female-produced airborne pheromone to initiate courting behavior, The male responds to the presence of the pheromone with rapid, oriented locomotion. Contact with the female (or other males or larvae) elicits wing-raising and other responses characteristic of male courtship behavior. Males of other species within the genus Periplaneta also respond to a female-produced pheromone, but with less intensity than P. americana. Cross-species testing shows that P. brunnea males respond to the Periplaneta pheromone with the same intensity elicited by the P. brunnea pheromone. A second reaction group containing P. australasiae, P. fuliginosa, and P. japonica also responds to the P. americana pheromone and their conspecific pheromones, but with a low intensity characteristic of these species. Alteration of the antennal morphology of P. americana males can be experimentally induced by manipulating the level of juvenile hormone during development. Males with a full adult complement of olfactory receptors all respond behaviorally to the pheromone. Adult males with larval antennae produced by bilateral treatment with exogenous juvenile hormone-mimic do not respond to the pheromone, although they are completely adult in other respects. Cockroaches employ pheromones or sex attractants to initiate courtship behavior (Roth and Barth, '67). The mating behavior of species within the genus Periplaneta, especially that of the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, has been described in detail by several workers (Roth and Willis, '52; Wharton et al., '54a;b; Barth, '61, '70; Roth and Barth, '67; Frazier, '70; Simon, '71). In general, these studies indicate that in the genus Periplaneta the initial step in male mating behavior is olfactory reception of a female-produced sex attractant. Mating behavior in cockroaches is also under endocrine control. The production of sex attractant by adult females in some species is under the control of the corpora allata, endocrine glands associated with the cerebral ganglia (Barth, '65, '68). In P. americana sex attractant is produced in large quantities by virgin females one to two weeks after the adult ecdysis (mar ton and Wharton, '57; Bodenstein, '70). Pheromone production stops during pregnancy and generally declines with age (Barth, '68). The midgut is the most likely site of pheromone production in P. americana (Bodenstein, '701, which makes female feces a good source of sex attractant for experimental studies (cf. Raisbeck,