Meeting Abstract
The current theory of thermoregulation does not adequately predict how organisms thermoregulate in nature. One reason the theory fails is because it does not account for ways that an organism interacts with other organisms in its environment. To account these biotic interactions, we used game theory to predict how fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, should select sites when laying eggs. To determine how flies should optimally behave, we examined the fitness of flies at treatment types that varied in density, temperature, food quality, and available space. To calculate fitness we used flies which had experienced different temperatures either in the lab or in the wild and tracked their survivorship and fecundity under different treatment types. To look at how the flies actually behave, we observed where flies chose to lay eggs under various densities of competing females. In each trial, 4 or 15 flies were placed within a thermal arena containing a choice of two oviposition sites, one at a preferred temperature (25 C) and another at a lower temperature (20 C). We found that flies changed their behavior as density changed and how they changed their behavior depended on the other treatment variables. We then compared the choices these flies made to their calculated fitness’s under each treatment type to determine if the flies were behaving optimally. By drawing on game theory to make quantitative predictions, this research builds on previous empirical studies of competition between thermoregulating animals.
