Dietary yeast affects preference and performance in .

Yeasts play an important role in nutrition physiology and host attraction of many species, and associations with various yeast species are documented for several drosophilid flies. The pest (Matsumura) has a predominant association with the yeast However, research has not been conducted on the nutritional physiology of the yeasts associated with (spotted wing drosophila). Therefore, in this study, we determined whether dietary yeast was nutritionally relevant and whether yeast species closely associated with positively affected life-history traits. Our results confirm a crucial role of dietary yeast in the larval development and survival of Furthermore, we found specific effects of the closely associated yeast species and sp. on larval survival. Observations of the egg-laying behaviour of on cherry fruits artificially colonised with different yeast species revealed that the number of eggs laid increased on fruits colonised with sp. and .