Abstract
Natural selection favours animals that forage more efficiently, such as those finding food faster, choosing better patches or increasing their rate of energy gain. Indeed, foraging behaviour has an effect on fitness, with better foragers producing more offspring. However, the evolution of foraging behaviour and its consequences on reproductive success has usually been tested in one generation only and the quantitative effects on fitness are not always measured. Here we artificially selected Drosophila melanogaster adults for their ability to find food quickly in a simple maze and measured the effect of this selection on their fitness. We tested two treatments, with four selected and two control independent replicates: i) selected flies, which were the fastest to find a food source inside a maze, and ii) control flies, which were randomly selected regarding their location in the maze. Fitness was calculated measuring fecundity and offspring survivorship. Our results show that after five generations, flies selected for better foraging found food two times faster than control flies. Additionally, selected flies had higher fitness than control flies, mainly because of greater fecundity in females during the first generation. These results show that foraging behaviour has a strong response to selection in few generations and that selection on foraging ability can have a correlated positive effect on fitness, nevertheless, this response is diluted over generations possibly due to the negative effect associated with the selection process.
Significant statement
Natural selection favours animals that forage more efficiently, such as those finding food faster. However, most of the literature measuring the relationship between foraging efficiency and fitness usually only measures the effects in the first generation. In an experiment, we artificially selected Drosophila adult flies that found food faster in a simple maze and we also measured the fecundity and offspring survivorships in selected and non-selected flies. After five generations, the selected flies found food 2.46 times faster than their F1 (founding population) and the control flies that were not selected. Fecundity was higher for selected flies only in the first generation, correlation that was lost as the generations passed. These results show that foraging behaviour has a strong response to selection in a few generations and that the possible correlated positive effects on fitness are diluted over generations.
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Data related with this manuscript is available on https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/z2yp9pjcjm/draft?a=3c4b1330-e899-47dc-b579-9c287ffb236d.
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Acknowledgments
We especially thank Adriana Ramírez Vargas for her guidance and assistance with flies’ maintenance. We thank members of the Guevara-Fiore Laboratory, for their assistance with selection experiments. John A. Endler and Thomas A. Keaney provided helpful comments on the manuscript. This research was supported by funding from VIEP-BUAP. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments and advice on the manuscript.
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PGF and MS conceived the study; MS, DP & PL collected the data; MS & PL carried out the carried out the analyses; and MS, PGF & PL contributed to writing up the paper.
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Sevenello, M., Luna, P., De La Rosa-Perea, D. et al. Direct and correlated responses to artificial selection on foraging in Drosophila. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 77, 89 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-023-03363-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-023-03363-1