Weather is capable of affecting the determination of sex in insect offspring, finds a new research by the University of Montreal in Canada.

Lead researchers Joffrey Moiroux and Jacques Brodeur said an insect's offspring gender, male or female, depends on temperature level like how hot or cold the climate is. For the study, researchers focused on a species of oophagous parasitoid called Trichogramma euproctidis.

It is type of an insect that lays eggs inside a host insect and they will get consumed by the future larvae. "We know that climate affects the reproductive behavior of insects. But we never clearly demonstrated the effects of climate change on sex allocation in parasitoids", said Moiroux.

Gender determination of Trichogramma parasitoids is known as 'haplodiploid'. It means fertilized eggs produce female offspring and on the other hand, unfertilized eggs produce male offspring.

Moiroux said it is possible to predict whether the parasitoid will deliver a male or a daughter by observing the presence of a pause or absence of it in during its abdominal contractions at the time of spawning.

By the word 'pause', Moiroux means the egg will be fertilized. The absence of it means the egg would not get fertilized. To know whether climate change would modify the fertilization, researchers exposed female Trichogramma to three different temperature ranges, 34 degrees Celsius, 24 degrees Celsius and 14 degrees Celsius.

When the temperature was hot, the female insects deliberately produced more males than at medium temperatures. It also got noticed that the Trichogramma's ability to program the sex of its offspring seemed compromised when the temperature was cold.

They were found spawn as many as females as during medium temperature, but the eggs were not fertilized. Moiroux said larger females live longer and have higher fertility. On the other hand, males are less penalized than females when they are small.