Male Drosophila melanogaster learn to prefer an arbitrary trait associated with female mating status

Abstract

Although males are generally less discriminating than females when it comes to choosing a mate, they still benefit from distinguishing between mates that are receptive to courtship and those that are not, in order to avoid wasting time and energy. It is known that males of Drosophila melanogaster are able to learn to associate olfactory and gustatory cues with female receptivity, but the role of more arbitrary, visual cues in mate choice learning has been overlooked to date in this species. We therefore carried out a series of experiments to determine: 1) whether males had a baseline preference for female eye color (red versus brown), 2) if males could learn to associate an eye color cue with female receptivity, and 3) whether this association disappeared when the males were unable to use this visual cue in the dark. We found that naïve males had no baseline preference for females of either eye color, but that males which were trained with sexually receptive females of a given eye color showed a preference for that color during a standard binary choice experiment. The learned cue was indeed likely to be truly visual, since the preference disappeared when the binary choice phase of the experiment was carried out in darkness.This is, to our knowledge 1) the first evidence that male D. melanogaster can use more arbitrary cues and 2) the first evidence that males use visual cues during mate choice learning. Our findings suggest that that D. melanogaster has untapped potential as a model system for mate choice learning.

Changes in courtship behaviour following rejection: The influence of female phenotype in Drosophila melanogaster

“…No such significant change in courtship behaviour was observed for males interacting with a Small female, while males interacting with Control females reduced their CP somewhat. Our results add to the growing literature demonstrating that male D. melanogaster can associate a variety of female phenotypic traits with prior courtship failure and subsequently learn to reduce courtship behaviour towards females with those particular traits (Dukas, , ; Ejima et al., , ; Griffith & Ejima, ; Mehren, Ejima, & Griffith, ; Verzijden et al., ).…”

“…Courtship learning occurs when males modify their courtship behaviour following experience (Griffith & Ejima, ; Siegel & Hall, ; Verzijden, Abbott, Philipsborn, & Loeschcke, ). Male Drosophila melanogaster exhibits courtship learning with regard to non‐receptive females, which includes both sexually immature and recently mated females (Rezával et al., ).…”

The Role of Learning on Insect and Spider Sexual Behaviors, Sexual Trait Evolution, and Speciation

“…Experienced female damselflies learn to reject heterospecific males by recognizing their wing patches (Svensson et al, 2010(Svensson et al, , 2014Verzijden and Svensson, 2016). The acquisition of a preference for visual traits has also been reported in fruit flies [eye color, (Verzijden et al, 2015)], butterflies [hindwing ornamentation number, (Westerman et al, 2014)], or crickets [size, (Bateman et al, 2001)] (Figure 2). Recent studies on matechoice copying showed that virgin individuals tend to prefer male phenotypes with similar color type and ornamentation as the mate choice of another conspecific, e.g., in spiders, (Fowler-Finn et al, 2015) and fruit flies, (Mery et al, 2009;Nöbel et al, 2018a).…”

The microevolutionary response to male-limited X-chromosome evolution inDrosophila melanogasterreflects macroevolutionary patterns

“…Recent results suggest that vision may be more important to mating in Drosophila than was previously expected (Ribeiro et al 2018). Similarly, learned male mate choice has been demonstrated in the ancestral population (Verzijden et al 2015), and it is known that males use memory to evaluate their risk of sperm competition and allocate resources accordingly (Rouse et al 2018), so terms related to learning, memory and nervous system development may also be a result of selection via mating interactions.…”