Survival.csv from Fitness benefits of dietary restriction

Dietary restriction (DR) improves survival across a wide range of taxa yet remains poorly understood. The key unresolved question is whether this evolutionarily conserved response to temporary lack of food is adaptive. Recent work suggests that early-life DR reduces survival and reproduction when nutrients subsequently become plentiful, thereby challenging adaptive explanations. A new hypothesis maintains that increased survival under DR results from reduced costs of overfeeding. We tested the adaptive value of DR response in an outbred population of <i>Drosophila melanogaster</i> fruit flies. We found that DR females did not suffer from reduced survival upon subsequent re-feeding and had increased reproduction and mating success compared to their continuously fully fed (FF) counterparts. The increase in post-DR reproductive performance was of sufficient magnitude that females experiencing early-life DR had the same total fecundity as continuously FF individuals. Our results suggest that the DR response is adaptive and increases fitness when temporary food shortages cease.