Dynamics of Social Behavior in Fruit Fly Larvae

Durisko, Zachary; Kemp, Rebecca; Mubasher, Rameeshay; Dukas, Reuven

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095495

Cited by 66 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(46 reference statements)

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“…In nature, nutritional decisions can be complicated by several additional factors such as social information provided by other females (Battesti et al, 2012;Durisko et al, 2014;Lihoreau et al, 2016;Sarin and Dukas, 2009;Chabaud et al, 2009), competition (Eggert et al, 2008;Salomon et al, 2008), sexual interactions with males (Chapman and Partridge, 1996;Gorter et al, 2016) or the presence of beneficial microbial communities on foods (Venu et al, 2014;Wong et al, 2015). Thanks to their unique association with food as shelter, breeding sites and sources of nutrients, fruit flies hold considerable promise as model organisms with which to study these multi-level nutritional interactions within the extended integrative framework of nutritional ecology (Simpson et al, 2015a).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drosophila females trade off good nutrition with high quality oviposition sites when choosing foods

Lihoreau

Poissonnier

Isabel

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Animals, from insects to humans, select foods to regulate their acquisition of key nutrients in amounts and balances that maximise fitness. In species in which the nutrition of juveniles depends on parents, adults must make challenging foraging decisions that simultaneously address their own nutrient needs as well as those of their progeny. Here, we examined how the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a species in which individuals eat and lay eggs in decaying fruits, integrate feeding decisions (individual nutrition) and oviposition decisions (offspring nutrition) when foraging. Using cafeteria assays with artificial diets varying in concentrations and ratios of protein to carbohydrates, we show that D. melanogaster females exhibit complex foraging patterns, alternating between laying eggs on high carbohydrate foods and feeding on foods with different nutrient contents depending on their own nutritional state. Although larvae showed faster development on high protein foods, both survival and learning performance were higher on balanced foods. We suggest that the apparent mismatch between the oviposition preference of females for high carbohydrate foods and the high performances of larvae on balanced foods reflects a natural situation where high carbohydrate ripened fruits gradually enrich in proteinaceous yeast as they start rotting, thereby yielding optimal nutrition for the developing larvae. Our findings that animals with rudimentary parental care uncouple feeding and egg-laying decisions in order to balance their own diet and provide a nutritionally optimal environment to their progeny reveal unsuspected levels of complexity in the nutritional ecology of parent-offspring interactions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drosophila females trade off good nutrition with high quality oviposition sites when choosing foods

Lihoreau

Poissonnier

Isabel

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…This aggregation can be modulated by the distribution of environmental resources, genetic determinants that determine the degree of resource exploitation versus exploration/ foraging (Sokolowski, 2010), and social mechanisms. For example, adult males lay pheromones that attract females to food sources (Lin et al, 2015), and larvae deposit aggregation pheromones (Mast et al, 2014) that may be used to facilitate food digestion (Durisko et al, 2014) and create opportunities for cannibalistic interactions (Vijendravarma et al, 2013).…”

Section: Group Behavior In Drosophila Melanogastermentioning

confidence: 99%

The neurogenetics of group behavior inDrosophila melanogaster

Ramdya

Schneider

Levine

2017

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Organisms rarely act in isolation. Their decisions and movements are often heavily influenced by direct and indirect interactions with conspecifics. For example, we each represent a single node within a social network of family and friends, and an even larger network of strangers. This group membership can affect our opinions and actions. Similarly, when in a crowd, we often coordinate our movements with others like fish in a school, or birds in a flock. Contributions of the group to individual behaviors are observed across a wide variety of taxa but their biological mechanisms remain largely unknown. With the advent of powerful computational tools as well as the unparalleled genetic accessibility and surprisingly rich social life of Drosophila melanogaster, researchers now have a unique opportunity to investigate molecular and neuronal determinants of group behavior. Conserved mechanisms and/or selective pressures in D. melanogaster can likely inform a much wider phylogenetic scale. Here, we highlight two examples to illustrate how quantitative and genetic tools can be combined to uncover mechanisms of two group behaviors in D. melanogaster: social network formation and collective behavior. Lastly, we discuss future challenges towards a full understanding how coordinated brain activity across many individuals gives rise to the behavioral patterns of animal societies.

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“…Softer substrates permit more ovipositional activity with lesser effort since Drosophila have a tendency to puncture substrates to implant their eggs. [53][54][55] In addition, all of the through-holes (d ¼ 0.5 mm diameter) in the soft substrate had less than four eggs per hole due to the small spatial constraints.…”

Section: Effect Of Substrate Stiffness On Oviposition Site Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agar-polydimethylsiloxane devices for quantitative investigation of oviposition behaviour of adult Drosophila melanogaster

et al. 2015

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Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) is a model organism and its behaviours including oviposition (egg-laying) on agar substrates have been widely used for assessment of a variety of biological processes in flies. Physical and chemical properties of the substrate are the dominant factors affecting Drosophila's oviposition, but they have not been investigated precisely and parametrically with the existing manual approaches. As a result, many behavioral questions about Drosophila oviposition, such as the combined effects of the aforementioned substrate properties (e.g., exposure area, sugar content, and stiffness) on oviposition and viability, and their threshold values, are yet to be answered. In this paper, we have devised a simple, easily implementable, and novel methodology that allows for modification of physical and chemical composition of agar substrates in order to quantitatively study survival and oviposition of adult fruit flies in an accurate and repeatable manner. Agar substrates have been modified by surface patterning using single and hexagonally arrayed through-hole polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membranes with various diameters and interspacing, as well as by substrate stiffness and sugar content modification via alteration of chemical components. While pure PDMS substrates showed a significant lethal effect on flies, a 0.5 mm diameter through-hole access to agar was found to abruptly increase the survival of adult flies to more than 93%. Flies avoided ovipositing on pure PDMS and on top of substrates with 0.5 mm diameter agar exposure areas. At a hole diameter of 2 mm (i.e., 0.25% exposure area) or larger, eggs were observed to be laid predominately inside the through-holes and along the edges of the PDMS-agar interface, showing a trending increase in site selection with 4 mm (i.e., 1% exposure area threshold) demonstrating natural oviposition rates similar to pure agar. The surfacemodified agar-PDMS hybrid devices and the threshold values reported for the substrate physical and chemical conditions affecting oviposition are novel; therefore, we advocate their use for future in-depth studies of oviposition behaviour in Drosophila melanogaster with accuracy and repeatability. The technique is also useful for development of novel assays for learning and decision-making studies as well as miniaturized devices for self-assembly of eggs and embryonic developmental investigations. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx

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Dynamics of Social Behavior in Fruit Fly Larvae

Cited by 66 publications

References 47 publications

Drosophila females trade off good nutrition with high quality oviposition sites when choosing foods

Drosophila females trade off good nutrition with high quality oviposition sites when choosing foods

The neurogenetics of group behavior inDrosophila melanogaster

Agar-polydimethylsiloxane devices for quantitative investigation of oviposition behaviour of adult Drosophila melanogaster

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