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Yellow Dung Fly Breeding

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Success of male yellow dung fly breeding.
Introduction
Looking at the yellow dung fly, Scathophaga stercoraria, it is seen that the species experiences sexual dimorphism in the form of both size and colour. This gives changes between the males and females that are specially adapted to give them the best chance of producing offspring. Males are considerably larger than the females and have clearly defining yellow hair along the abdomen, whereas females are smaller and are more of an olive green colour. Copulation for this species occurs on large mammal faeces as it acts as a source of nutrition for larvae once eggs are hatched. The right to breed with a female is highly competitive among yellow dung flies and only the most suited mate or the most opportunistic mate will be able to pass on its sperm. Assessing the size of males is key when looking at the mating probability of the yellow dung fly …show more content…

Mean HTL of the 4 different male yellow dung fly categories. The mean size for males found on the faeces is clearly larger than those off the pat, and the mean HTL is the largest in paired males on the pat.

Looking at Fig 1. it can be speculated that larger males are more successful at copulating, however with the data presented there is not a large enough sample size over the two sites to confirm this. Males on the pat are larger on both instances compared to males off the pat but due to overlapping of error bars, it cannot be stated with confidence that they are indeed more successful. The only statement that can be made with confidence is that paired males on the pat are considerably larger than solo males off the pat, this can be stated as the error bars do not overlap. With only one sample of paired males off the pat, there is no way to know if error bars would overlap with any other group if the sample size was larger. The paired males off the pat then can be only taken as an estimation because of this.

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