Meeting Abstract
Innate cognitive and sensory biases can heavily influence the decisions an animal makes in its environment. In many species, sensory biases have been shown to influence disparate components of an animal’s life history (e.g specific color bias for both feeding and mate selection). Although it is often assumed that these observed overlaps in behavioral biases have evolved due to pleiotropic effects, our incomplete knowledge of the exact evolutionary pressures that shaped a given animal’s behavioral biases makes it impossible to verify this assertion in a natural setting. Using experimental evolution for 140 generations, we successfully evolved differential oviposition biases for pineapple and orange flavored substrates in replicate populations of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. We subjected adults and larvae from these populations to a series of assays to determine if evolved oviposition bias influenced decision making behavior when feeding on, flying towards, or standing on orange and pineapple substrates. We did not find a positive correlation between any of the newly assayed behaviors and a population’s originally evolved oviposition bias. To better understand our findings, we used Real-Time PCR to analyze tissue-specific differential expression of several genes implicated in oviposition, decision making and gustatory perception. Our study, which to the best of our knowledge represents the first such investigation into an experimentally evolved sensory bias, suggests that innate biases can evolve in an extremely specific manner that does not affect other measured aspects of behavior and decision making.
