Body size and fecundity in the waterstrider Aquarius remigis: A test of Darwin's fecundity advantage hypothesis

The general female bias in body size of animals is usually attributed to fecundity selection. While many studies have demonstrated a positive relationship between body size and fecundity, the most common interpretation of fecundity selection is that larger females have larger abdomens and can hold more eggs, yet the relationship between abdomen size and fecundity has rarely been examined. For the waterstrider, Aquarius remigis, we find a significant relationship between body size and fecundity and demonstrate that the target of fecundity selection is abdomen size. Thus, larger females have higher fecundities because they have larger abdomens and not because of their total size per se. The rate at which fecundity increases with increasing abdomen size exceeds that which would be expected due to a simple volume constraint and suggests that other factors, such as increased ability to obtain resources, may contribute to the increase in fecundity with body size. Selection intensities estimated from our data indicate that fecundity selection could be a significant selective force on both total and abdomen lengths. Previous studies have found that abdomen size increased faster than body size and thus, larger females had relatively larger abdomens. The relationship of abdomen length and thorax length in A. remigis is hypoallometric and indicates that larger females have relatively smaller abdomens. We hypothesize that this may reflect conservation of abdomen size in females developing under poor conditions. Finally, while egg size is not directly related to body size, we find a trade-off between egg size and number when female abdomen length is held constant, suggesting that selection on egg size may influence abdomen length only indirectly through its effects on fecundity.