Fig.2: Juvenile starvation in males results in aberrant maintenance of juvenile behavior.
(a) Males show enhanced chemosensory avoidance behavior following L1 starvation. Left panel shows predicted synaptic input into avoidance behavior1,5. All experiments used tax-4 (p678) mutants to disable amphid input, as previously described5. Control animals are non-starved siblings of starved animals. Each dot represents the reversal index of one animal over 10 experimental trials, vertical magenta bar is median. n=number of animals, shown in panel a,b. p-values shown by two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test with Bonferroni corrections for multiple testing (where applicable; see Methods) and 95% confidence intervals. Neither L1-starved nor continuously-fed adult males change between adulthood days 1 and 2 (Extended Data Fig.2a).
(b) Males show mating defects. Each step of mating (schematized left) was scored in adult males following L1 starvation (grey bars) and compared to progeny of the starved generation (black bars). For behaviors left of the red bar, efficiency is success rate/animal. For “loss of hermaphrodite contact”, efficiency is failure rate/animal. Error bars show standard deviation, center bar shows mean. Each dot represents one animal (overlapping points graphically omitted). p-values shown by two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test.