SEX with your ex can often be a mistake. So too, it seems, for female crickets, who may actually mark conquests with their scent just to avoid mating with them again.
Female crickets (Gryllodes sigillatus) typically mate with at least two different males every night. Tracie Ivy and colleagues at Illinois State University in Normal noticed that females preferred novel males to familiar partners and guessed that the females were recognising a chemical scent. To test whether the males or females were producing the marker, they created a series of inbred families in which siblings would look and sound slightly different, but would carry identical chemical signals.
The females were quite happy to mate first with one male and then with his brother, who should smell the same, ruling out the possibility that the vital chemical signal was coming from the males (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3222).
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By contrast, females shunned males that had recently mated with their sisters, though they had never encountered them before. 鈥淔emales mistook their sisters鈥� markers as their own and thought 鈥榟ey I鈥檝e been there, I should avoid him鈥�;,鈥� says Ivy.
