11Deciding where to eat and raise offspring carries important fitness consequences for all 12 animals, especially if foraging, feeding and reproduction increase the risk of exposure to 13 pathogens. In insects with complete metamorphosis, foraging occurs mainly during the larval 14 stage, while oviposition decisions are taken by adult-stage females. Selection for infection 15 avoidance behaviours may therefore be developmentally uncoupled. Using a combination of 16 experimental infections and behavioural choice assays, here we tested if Drosophila 17 melanogaster fruit flies avoid potentially infectious environments at distinct developmental 18 stages. When given conspecific fly carcasses as a food source, larval-stage flies did not 19 discriminate between carcasses that were clean or infected with the pathogenic Drosophila C 20 Virus (DCV), even though scavenging was a viable route of DCV transmission. Adult females 21 however, discriminated between different oviposition sites, laying more eggs near a clean 22 rather than an infectious carcass if they were healthy; DCV-infected females did not 23 discriminate between the two environments. While potentially risky, laying eggs near 24 potentially infectious carcasses was always preferred to sites containing only fly medium. Our 25 findings suggest that infection avoidance can play an important role in how mothers provision 26 their offspring, and underline the need to consider infection avoidance behaviours at multiple 27 life-stages. 28 29 30
29Wolbachia--mediated protection against viral infection has been extensively 30 demonstrated in Drosophila and in mosquitoes that are artificially inoculated with D. 31melanogaster Wolbachia (wMel), but to date no evidence for Wolbachia--mediated 32 antibacterial protection has been demonstrated in Drosophila. Here we show that D. 33 melanogaster carrying wMel shows reduced mortality during enteric - but not systemic 34 -- infection with the opportunist pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and that protection 35 is more pronounced in male flies. Wolbachia--mediated protection is associated with 36 increased early expression of the antimicrobial peptide attacinA, followed by increased 37 expression of a ROS detoxification gene (gstD8), and other tissue damage repair genes 38 which together contribute to greater host resistance and disease tolerance. These 39 results highlight that the route of infection is important for symbiont--mediated 40 protection from infection, that Wolbachia can protect hosts by eliciting a combination of 41 resistance and disease tolerance mechanisms, and that these effects are sexually 42 dimorphic. 43 44 54Wolbachia is a maternally--inherited, intracellular bacterium of arthropods and 55 nematodes, and is one of the best studied microbial symbionts (Brownlie and Johnson, 56 Hamilton and Perlman, 2013). Its host range is vast, with recent estimates that 57 48--57% of all terrestrial arthropods (Weinert et al., 2015), and at least 10% of all 58 Drosophila species carry Wolbachia (Mateos et al., 2006). The ability of some Wolbachia 59 strains to protect insect hosts from pathogenic infections make it particularly relevant 60 for potential bio--control of insect vectored zoonotic infections, and more broadly, 61 relevant as mediators of pathogen--mediated selection in insects (Brownlie and Johnson, 62 Hamilton and Perlman, 2013; Karyn N. Johnson, 2015). Aedes aegypti and Ae.
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