Male condition influences female post mating aggression and feeding in <i>Drosophila</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Mating changes female behaviour and physiology across a wide range of taxa, with important effects for male and female fitness. These changes are often induced by components of the male ejaculate, such as sperm and seminal fluid proteins. However, males can vary significantly in their ejaculates, due to factors such as age, mating history or nutritional status. This male variation may therefore lead to variation in the strength of responses males can stimulate in females, with alterations in fitness outcomes for both sexes. Using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster , we tested whether three aspects of male condition shape an important, but understudied, post‐mating response—increased female–female aggression. We found that females mated to old males fought less than females mated to young males. This effect was exacerbated in mates of old, sexually active males, but there was no effect of male starvation status on mating‐induced female aggression. There was also a significant effect of age and mating history on female post‐mating feeding duration. Our results add to a growing body of literature that variation in male condition can shape sexual selection through post‐mating responses in females, including female–female interactions. Studying such variation may therefore be useful for understanding how the condition of one sex affects the behaviour of the other. A free plain language summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".