Abstract
In this study we test one central prediction from sociogenomic theory—that social and non-social taxa share common genetic toolkits that regulate reproduction in response to environmental cues. We exposed Drosophila females of rover (for R) and sitter (for s) genotypes to an ovary-suppressing pheromone derived from the honeybee Apis mellifera. Surprisingly, queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) affected several measures of fitness in flies, and in a manner comparable to the pheromone’s normal effect on bee workers. QMP-treated sitter flies had smaller ovaries that contained fewer eggs than did untreated controls. QMP-treated rover flies, by contrast, showed a more variable pattern that only sometimes resulted in ovary inhibition, while a third strain of fly that contains a sitter mutant allele in a rover background (for s2) showed no ovarian response to QMP. Taken together, our results suggest that distinctly non-social insects have some capacity to respond to social cues, but that this response varies with fly genotype. In general, the interspecific response is consistent with a conserved gene set affecting reproductive physiology. The differential response among strains in particular suggests that for is itself important for modulating the fly’s pheromonal response.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Marla Sokolowski (University of Toronto) for the gift of rover and sitter flies, and for commenting on an earlier version of the manuscript. We also thank Emma Mullen and Catherine Gao from the Social Biology Group at Western University for help and discussion. This work was funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship to A.L.C. and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant to G.J.T.
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Communicated by: Sven Thatje
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Camiletti, A.L., Awde, D.N. & Thompson, G.J. How flies respond to honey bee pheromone: the role of the foraging gene on reproductive response to queen mandibular pheromone. Naturwissenschaften 101, 25–31 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-013-1125-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-013-1125-3