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Psyche 
[Vol. 94 
open to males, which need only produce energetically “cheap” 
sperm rather than expensive eggs. On the one hand, a male can 
copulate with as many females as time and conditions allow; alter- 
natively, he may be more careful to ensure, through attention and 
guarding, that the sperm transferred are actually used by the female 
to produce offspring (Waage, 1983). The stage is set in many ani- 
mals for sexual inequality: males may embark on highly polygynous 
reproductive lives, while females choose fewer times and more care- 
fully among the scrabbling suitors. With such inequities comes 
unfairness, especially among males: if one male can inseminate 
many females, but each female accepts only a few males, then many 
other males must never get the opportunity to mate. High variance 
in reproductive success among males is the basis for strong sexual 
selection on males (Darwin, 1859, 1871), which in turn is thought to 
sculpt the obvious morphological and behavioral dimorphism 
between the sexes that exists in the majority of animal species. 
It is often assumed, but rarely documented, that individual males 
of sexually dimorphic species inseminate many females, and can 
produce many more progeny than can individual females. Converse- 
ly, it follows that species displaying little sexual dimorphism should 
be reasonably equivalent in the reproductive potential of the two 
sexes. Insects are well suited for testing predictions of sexual selec- 
tion theory, because they exhibit inexhaustible diversity of life- 
history strategy (Dingle and Hegmann, 1982) and are often easy to 
observe and manipulate in the field and laboratory. For example, 
green chrysopid lacewings show a convenient range of sexual di- 
morphism, from extreme in Meleoma Fitch spp. (Bickley and 
MacLeod, 1956), through moderate in the common Chrysopa ocu- 
lata Say (Smith, 1922), to negligible in the carnea-g roup within the 
genus Chrysoperla Steinmann (Henry, 1983). Fortunately, most 
lacewing species adapt well to laboratory culturing, so simple stud- 
ies measuring individual reproductive success are both feasible and 
reasonably representative of conditions in nature. Here, we concen- 
trate on the reproductive biology of two well known, closely related 
species of the carnea- group, but we include some preliminary data 
on several other species characterized by greater sexual dimorphism. 
The principal protagonists are the sympatric, closely related 
North American species C. plorabunda (Fitch) and C. downesi 
(Smith). C. plorabunda is a common meadow-dwelling form with 
multiple generations per year, while C. downesi is a darker green 
