Fig. 1.

Mated female Drosophila melanogaster transfer information about favorable egg-laying patches. a Bioassay for testing chemical cues about egg-laying sites. One of two food patches of identical nutritional quality is exposed to a single sender fly, which is discarded after 6 hr, and a mated female is introduced in the arena and allowed to lay eggs on both patches. b Egg laying preference of a responder female to two food patches, one of which was previously exposed to flies of the indicated sex and mating status. c Egg-laying preference of a responder female to two food patches of identical nutritional quality; as for (b) except that both patches have been previously exposed to flies of the indicated sex and mating status. d Bioassay of the ability of senders to transfer information about favorable egg-laying sites. Similar to the bioassay in (a), except that the sender female is free to explore both food patches and the two food patches are of different quality (yeast added to the high quality patch). e Egg-laying preference of a mated female to two high quality egg-laying patches, one of which was previously housed with either a mated or a virgin female free to visit both patches. f Egg-laying preference of a mated female to one high quality egg-laying food patch containing 100 % yeast (left side of the graph), and a second food patch containing one of three possible concentrations of yeast and that had been or not previously exposed to a mated female (right side of the graph). Errors bars indicate minimum and maximum data points. Number of replicates is indicated in brackets. Preference for a site is indicated in each box plot by asterisks, as determined by a two-tailed exact Wilcoxon signed rank test (n.s. = not significant; ***, P < 0.001). Different letters (a, b) on the side of the box plots indicate differences between groups, as determined by a logistic regression model; see Table S4 for full statistics