Planning the Mating Experiment!

To test the male-effect on pill bugs, the experimental setup requires different sexes of pill bugs to be separated into different groups. During the month of February to March, it is the time of the year that female pill bugs are predicted to be very probably entering the pre-parturial intermoult (179). The experimental design will involve the following groups of pill bugs:

                  1) Negative control group = female + female
                  2) Positive control group = male + female*
                  3) Treatment group 1 = female + female, each will be further mated once
                  4) Treatment group 2 = female + female, each will be further mated twice
*The purpose of positive control group is to be compared with the other three groups.

 All of these groups of pill bugs should be placed into identical tanks/boxes, filled with moistened dirt and enough food for several months and maintained in the same conditions. After two or three weeks, females from the treatment groups should be placed into petri dishes to individually confront a male for a limited amount of time (e.g. one hour). Encounters should be repeated on a regular basis until “a male initiated a mating sequence (typically consisiting of mounting attempts and two successive mating postures to inseminate the right and left female genital ducts)” (179). Towards the end of the experiment, females in the negative control group would have to be dissected to verify their virginity as well as to confirm the presence of sperm in the genital ducts of all other females in the positive control and the two other treatment groups.


For the full text of the published research article, please visit:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07924259.2010.9652331

FRANÇOIS LEFEBVRE & YVES CAUBET (2010): Female-extended control over their reproductive investment: the role of early mating interactions on oocyte maturation in the terrestrial crustacean Armadillidium vulgare (Latreille, 1804), Invertebrate Reproduction & Development, 54:4, 177-186.