Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, Vol 53, Issue 4 B245-B251, Copyright © 1998 by The Gerontological Society of America

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Relationship of age patterns of fecundity to mortality, longevity, and lifetime reproduction in a large, cohort of mediterranean fruit fly females

JR Carey, P Liedo, H-G Muller, J-L Wang and J-M Chiou
Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis and Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California, Berkeley.

Daily reproduction was monitored throughout the lives of 1000 individual female Mediterranean fruit flies (Ceratitis capitata). Inasmuch as the average female medfly lived 35.6 days and laid 740 eggs in her lifetime, the overall data set consisted of information on around 740,000 eggs distributed over 35,600 fly-days. Results described include the frequency distributions of eggs/days at young (<=30 days), middle (31-60 days), and older (61-90 days) ages, the relationship between individual life span and lifetime reproduction, the distribution of deaths for non-egg layers versus egg layers, and density plots for daily egg production relative to both lifetime reproduction and life span. One of the more surprising results was the lack of correlation of the total number of eggs laid by females at younger ages (all ages under 30) and subsequent reproduction and life span. Technical and conceptual implications for analyses of reproductive data on other species and groups are briefy discussed.

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