Life history theory predicts that a nontrivial proportion of parasitoids should exhaust their egg supply during their lifetime.
We investigated possible correlations between time of day, time of year, ambient temperature, parasitoid size, and host density on egg limitation in A. aonidiae.
We found a slight tendency for egg load to drop during the course of the day.
Although we could detect no effect of time of year or of temperature on egg load, larger parasitoids had higher egg loads than did smaller ones.
Parasitoids may reduce the risk of egg limitation when the host encounter rate is high by exhibiting increasingly selective host-use patterns with declining egg load.
当寄主遭遇率高时，寄生蜂可以通过表现出越来越有选择性的寄主使用模式以及卵载量下降来降低卵限制的风险。
Female parasitoids lay eggs on, in, or near host insects.
Here, we assess the evidence for and against egg limitation of parasitoids in the field.