On the use of kinship and familiarity associated social information in mediating Drosophila melanogaster oviposition decisions

Decisions where an individual lays their eggs are important, as the choice may affect their offspring's survival and lifetime reproductive success. Information produced by conspecifics can potentially be useful in making decisions as this "social information" may provide an energetically cheaper means of assessing oviposition site suitability rather than acquiring it personally. However, as not all public information may be equally beneficial, cues produced by kin may be especially valuable as they might signal suitable microenvironments, and are associated with other fitness advantages resulting from improved foraging success and/or a decreased risk of competition/cannibalism compared to sites where unrelated conspecifics are located. Using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, we explored whether public information use is associated with kin-based egg-laying decisions. Kinship is potentially recognized in several ways, including environmentally-associated proxy cues, so we explored whether there were biases in how focal females interacted with cues from conspecifics that differed in both genetic relatedness, and environmental "familiarity." In a series of inter-connected assays, we examined the behaviour of focal females that interacted with a choice of potential egg-laying substrates that differed in the manner of their prior conspecific exposure, and counted the offspring that eclosed from these different substrates. Sites that had exhibited cues produced by conspecific demonstrators were visited more, and yielded more focal offspring compared to unexposed substrates. Furthermore, patterns of bias in offspring production were consistent with ovipositing females exhibiting sensitivity to the kinship status of the prior substrate's occupants. The basis of the kinship categorization by ovipositing females appears to be based on phenotypes that reflect true genetic relatedness, but the nature of the social information can be affected by other factors. These results further highlight the potential usefulness of D. melanogaster as a model to understand the evolution of social behaviour in the expression of decision-making.