IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v19y2008i6p1122-1127.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Relative size influences gender role in the freshwater hermaphroditic snail, Helisoma trivolvis

Author

Listed:
  • Cynthia G. Norton
  • Angela F. Johnson
  • Rebecca L. Mueller

Abstract

Simultaneous hermaphrodites have the unique challenge of allocating their available resources to egg and sperm production and behaviorally to a male and/or female mating role. Models that address the influence of body size on sex allocation predict that larger individuals should allocate proportionally more resources to female than male function and that this should translate into corresponding behavioral preferences during mating. We investigated the relationship between size and gender role in the hermaphroditic freshwater snail Helisoma trivolvis. We hypothesized that when 2 H. trivolvis mate, the larger would assume the female role and the smaller the male role. We also predicted that reciprocal mating would be more likely when partners were similar in size. We measured 180 snails, paired them, and observed their sex roles during copulation. The size difference between snails neither influenced the latency to copulation nor predicted whether mating was unilateral or reciprocal. In unilateral matings, the smaller snail acted as the male significantly more often than the larger snail. In order to test the hypothesis that increased activity of smaller snails influences gender role, we also measured movement rates in snails of various sizes but found no relationship between size and activity. These experiments indicate that in H. trivolvis body size does influence gender role in unilateral matings, and enable us to rule out activity as a direct determinant of male gender role. Whether snails mate reciprocally or not may depend on other factors such as previous mating history, time of isolation, or age. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Cynthia G. Norton & Angela F. Johnson & Rebecca L. Mueller, 2008. "Relative size influences gender role in the freshwater hermaphroditic snail, Helisoma trivolvis," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 19(6), pages 1122-1127.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:19:y:2008:i:6:p:1122-1127
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arn099
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yumi Nakadera & Elferra M. Swart & Jeroen P.A. Maas & Kora Montagne-Wajer & Andries Ter Maat & Joris M. Koene, 2015. "Effects of age, size, and mating history on sex role decision of a simultaneous hermaphrodite," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 26(1), pages 232-241.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:19:y:2008:i:6:p:1122-1127. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/beheco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.