Vega-Trejo Regina, Sanghvi Krish, Todorova Biliana, Sepil Irem, Bath Eleanor
Department of Biology, University of Oxford, 11a Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3SZ, UK.
Sci Rep. 2024 Dec 30;14(1):31916. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83465-6.
Mate availability and social information can influence mating behaviour in both males and females. Social information obtained from conspecifics can influence mate choice, particularly shown by studies on mate choice copying. However, the role of directly observing conspecific mating on mating behaviour has been less explored. As such, whether conspecifics are copulating or not could inform 'observers' about the availability of mates, or even stimulate observers to mate themselves. Using Drosophila melanogaster, we tested whether exposure to the visual cue of a mating pair would increase the mating propensity of an observer pair (i.e., voyeur). We followed a factorial design where a male-female pair (voyeur flies) were placed together with or without visual access to another pair of flies (who were either mating or not mating). We found no evidence that mating latency or duration of mating were affected by whether voyeurs had visual access to a mating or non-mating pair. These results could be due to biological factors (e.g., use of other non-visual cues by flies to acquire information related to sex), or methodological limitations of our study (e.g., flies unable to watch other pairs). Generally, our results suggest that fruit flies do not use visual cues from conspecifics mating to adjust their own mating latency or mating duration.
配偶可得性和社会信息会影响雄性和雌性的交配行为。从同种个体获得的社会信息会影响配偶选择，这在配偶选择模仿的研究中表现得尤为明显。然而，直接观察同种个体交配在交配行为中的作用却鲜有研究。因此，同种个体是否正在交配可能会让“观察者”了解配偶的可得性，甚至刺激观察者自己进行交配。我们使用黑腹果蝇来测试暴露于一对正在交配的果蝇的视觉线索是否会增加一对观察果蝇（即偷窥果蝇）的交配倾向。我们采用析因设计，将一对雌雄果蝇（偷窥果蝇）与另一对果蝇（正在交配或未交配）一起放置，前者能或不能看到后者。我们没有发现证据表明偷窥果蝇是否能看到正在交配或未交配的一对果蝇会影响交配潜伏期或交配持续时间。这些结果可能是由于生物学因素（例如，果蝇使用其他非视觉线索来获取与交配相关的信息），或者是我们研究的方法学局限性（例如，果蝇无法观看其他果蝇对）。总体而言，我们的结果表明果蝇不会利用同种个体交配的视觉线索来调整自己的交配潜伏期或交配持续时间。
