Within- and among-population variation in oviposition preference of urea-supplemented food in Drosophila melanogaster.
Loading...
Date
1997-06
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Oviposition preference for urea-supplemented food was assayed by simultaneous
choice trials on five pairs of closely related laboratory populations of Drosophila melanogaster.
Each pair of populations had been derived from a separate ancestral population about 85
generations prior to this study. One population in each pair had been subjected to selection for
larval tolerance to the toxic effects of urea; the other population served as a control. Considerable
variation in oviposition preference was seen both within and among populations, with four of the
ten populations showing a significant mean preference for urea-supplemented food. The degree of
specificity shown by individual females was surprisingly high, leading to a bi-modal distribution
of oviposition preference in some populations. Overall, selection for larval tolerance to urea did
not significantly affect oviposition preference. However, the data indicated that pair-wise
comparisons between randomly selected populations from the two larval selection regimes would
lead to a range of possible outcomes, suggesting, in several cases, that selection for larval urea
tolerance had led to significant differentiation of adult oviposition preference for urea in one or the
other direction. The results, therefore, highlight the importance of population level replication
and caution against the practice, common in ecological studies, of assaying oviposition preference
in two populations that utilize different hosts in nature, and then drawing broad evolutionary
inferences from the results.
Description
Keywords
Egg-laying behaviour, oviposition preference, specificity, urea, population differenttiation, host specialization
Citation
Joshi Amitabh, Oshiro Wendy A, Shiotsugu Jason, Mueller Laurence D. Within- and among-population variation in oviposition preference of urea-supplemented food in Drosophila melanogaster. Journal of Biosciences. 1997 Jun; 22(3): 325-338.