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

Kinship is potentially recognized in several ways, including cues produced by environmentally-associated gut microbiota of the egg-laying flies, and so we also explored whether there were biases in how focal females interacted with cues from individuals that differed in both their genetic relatedness, as well as their environmental “familiarity.” In a series of inter-connected assays, we examined the egg-laying behaviour of females that interacted with a choice of potential egg-laying substrates that differed in the manner of their prior conspecific exposure.

Not only do female flies lay more eggs on sites that had cues left behind by conspecifics compared to unexposed substrates, but they also exhibited strong biases in their oviposition patterns that was consistent with being sensitive to the kinship status of the prior substrate occupants. Furthermore, while females did not apparently discriminate between sites differing in prior egg abundance, they did exhibit bias in their egg-laying based on the population of origin of the demonstrator female.

The basis of the kinship categorization by ovipositing females appears to be based on phenotypes that reflect true genetic relatedness that are neither mimicked nor disrupted by the conspecific’s developmental environment. These results highlight the potential usefulness of D. melanogaster as a model to understand the evolution of social behaviour in the expression of decision-making. The data here represent behavioural and reproductive data collected in four inter-related experiments (counts of visits, number of offspring).

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