Intergenerational transfer of reproductive plasticity in female fruitflies

There is increasing interest in potentially adaptive plastic responses of animals to their social environment, both within and across generations. We have previously shown that female Drosophila melanogaster express plasticity in egg laying and mating latency in response to the presence of other females, but we do not know how the maternal social environment affects the plasticity of daughters. Here, we used D. melanogaster to test the effect of the maternal social environment on the phenotypic plasticity of daughters. Using a fully factorial design, we exposed female flies to different social environments (isolated or grouped) before mating them and collecting their daughters. One daughter per mother was then also exposed to isolated or grouped conditions before mating. We recorded the mating latency, mating duration and number of eggs laid in each generation. Morphological measurements were taken of another subset of daughters, consisting of wing length, wing area, thorax length, the number of mature oocytes and the number of ovarioles in ovaries.