On the use of private versus social information in oviposition site choice decisions by Drosophila melanogaster females
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Individuals are faced with decisions throughout their lifetimes, and the choices they make often have important consequences toward their fitness. Being able to discern which available option is best to pursue often incurs sampling costs, which may be largely avoided by copying the behavior and decisions of others. Although social learning and copying behaviors are widespread, much remains unknown about how effective and adaptive copying behavior is, as well as the factors that underlie its expression. Recently, it has been suggested that since female fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) appear to rely heavily on public information when selecting oviposition sites, they are a promising model system for researching patch-choice copying, and more generally, the mechanisms that control decision making. Here, we set out to determine how well female distinguish between socially produced cues, and whether females are using “relevant” signals when choosing an oviposition site. We found that females showed a strong preference for ovipositing on media patches that had been previously occupied by ovipositing females of the same species and diet over other female outgroups. However, in a separate assay, we observed that females favored ovipositing on media patches that previously housed virgin males over those exhibiting alternative conspecific signals. Our results confirm that females use cues left behind by other flies when choosing between potential oviposition sites, though their prioritization of these signals raises serious questions as to whether fruit flies are employing copying behavior, or are instead responding to signals that may not be of relevance to oviposition site suitability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".