Insect sexual dimorphism where only the males are flightless

Factual Questions
1

I was thinking about glow worms and oil beetles and winter apple moths - where the females of the species are flightless and typically don’t travel very far from the place they hatched, grew and pupated into adulthood. The flightless females are visited by flying males, which they attract by various means.

This means, I suppose, that a lot of the energy stored by the female can be devoted to making eggs - and perhaps a greater egg-load can be developed than would be practical to fly around with, so there are advantages that could drive selection there.

But there are disadvantages too - not being able to fly limits the capacity to evade predators, especially non-flying ones, and it also limits the capacity for the species to spread into other locations for example when recovering from something that hits the population hard like exceptional weather - if the female can’t fly, the next generation of offspring isn’t going to be very far from the last one.

Anyway, sometimes nature does weird things and I was wondering if there are any examples (in insects) where the dimorphism works the other way - flightless males vs females that can fly. I can’t think of any, and indeed I can’t think of any very good reasons why this would be an advantageous setup, but that could just be failure of imagination on my part and anyway, sometimes nature does weird things.

So are there any insect species where the females fly and the males are flightless?

2

I thought I had remembered one, but according to Mr. Google my memory was wrong. However, Mr. Google did helpfully provide me with an answer.

There are some species of parasitic wasps in the Trichogrammatidae family where the males are wingless but the females can fly. Well, sorta. They are rather tiny, and while the females do technically fly, they aren’t strong fliers and rely more on air currents than their wings to get around.

3

@engineer_comp_geek , was the example you thought you were remembering winged ants? Because that’s the one I thought of, too. Except that apparently, in those species, both males and females have wings around the time of mating.

4

I know this because of the “wasps” episode of the -ologies podcast! Fig wasps (Agaonidae). The females have wings and the males don’t.

Spheksology (WASPS) with Eric Eaton — alie ward

5

Yes, it was.