Development time and fitness: is there an adaptive development delay in the Rhodnius prolixus fifth nymphal stage?

ELIS ALDANA; MEDONE, PAULA; DANIELA PINEDA; MENU, FRÉDÉRIC; JORGE RABINOVICH

ENTOMOLOGIA EXPERIMENTALIS ET APPLICATA

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016

0013-8703

AbstractTriatomines (Hemiptera: Reduviidae) are vectors of Trypanosoma cruzi Chagas, theetiological agent of Chagas?s disease. They display pre-adult development delay? i.e., a development time much longer than on average ? which usually has beenconsidered as a maladaptive trait. However, this hypothesis has not beentested. We carried out an experiment under controlled laboratory conditions to (1)test whether a development delay exists in the fifth nymphal stage of Rhodnius prolixus Stål (Hemiptera: Reduviidae,Rhodniini), and (2) measure any fitness cost related to such delay byestimating the relationship between individual development time and other life-historytraits. We analyzed the development time with various continuous statisticaldistributions (normal, log-normal, Weibull, gamma, Pareto, Burr, andlog-logistic). Using goodness-of-fit tests the best fit was obtained withasymmetrical distributions, with the Burr distribution showing the best fit tothe data. We concluded that a development delay exists in stage 5 of R. prolixus without fitness cost. Thecombination of our results and previous work suggests that such a delay couldbe viewed as an adaptive response to environmental stochasticity and/or density-dependencerather than as a maladaptive trait. We propose further investigations toprovide a conclusive test of adaptive delay in triatomines.