Pre-Patch Experience Affects the Egg Distribution Pattern in a Polyembryonic Parasitoid of Moth Egg Batches

According to foraging theory, female parasitoids should alter their host choice in response to cues that indicate a limitation of resources. We tested whether females of the polyembryonic parasitoid Ageniaspis fuscicollis (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae), which attack egg batches of small ermine moths (Lepidoptera: Yponomeutidae), would alter their host acceptance pattern in response to different pre‐patch experience. We kept females of the parasitoid prior to a patch visit under different conditions, which should indicate different levels of competition for hosts. With increased competition as pre‐patch experience, females laid more eggs per host egg and self‐superparasitized more often, and the resultant egg distributions showed a trend from more regular distributions to increasingly Poisson and aggregated distributions. Consequently, females with a pre‐patch experience that would indicate low competition for hosts had the most even egg distributions. We conclude that pre‐patch experience of competitors may lead to a significant change of mutual interference patterns in egg‐laying A. fuscicollis wasps.