Copulatory wounding in Drosophila melanogaster

Copulation can result in males inflicting wounds to the female genitalia, so-called traumatic mating. Such wounds are potentially costly as they could be entry points for infections, and they have been associated with a shorter lifespan in insect species. In many species of insects, females mate with more than one male, which leads to the question of whether the number of matings affects the amount of genital damage that females suffer from those matings. Here we test whether copulation frequency affects the number or size of genital wounds in Drosophila melanogaster. Females who mated twice had more genital wounds and a larger total area of wounding, compared to females who mated once. However, females who refused to mate a second time had a similar area of wounding as females who mated twice. We found that wounds to the ventral abdomen also increased with increased mating frequency. Our results show that polyandry can result in increased female copulatory wounding in this species. The..., The data were obtained from wild-collected flies and experiments that were carried out in the lab. For full details, see the methods described in Subasi, Finsterbusch, Büge & Armitage: \"Two matings lead to more copulatory wounding than a single mating in female Drosophila melanogaster.\" 
Briefly, the fly and data collection were carried out in the methods described in Subasi, Finsterbusch, Büge & Armitage (2024). Females mating twice or refusing to remate receive more copulatory wounding than singly mated females. At data entry, the data were double-checked for accuracy., , # Copulatory wounding in *Drosophila melanogaster*

This cop_wound_readme.txt file was generated on 2024-02-06 by SOPHIE ARMITAGE.

## GENERAL INFORMATION

1. Title of Datasets: cop_wound_dataset
2. Author Information
Principal Investigator Contact Information
Name: Sophie Armitage
Institution: Freie Universität Berlin
Address: Königin-Luise-Str. 1-3, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])
3. Date of data collection: June 2021 to October 2024.
4. Geographic location of data collection: Berlin and Brandenburg, Germany
5. Information about funding sources that supported the collection of the data: SAOA was supported by a Heisenberg Fellowship (AR 872/4-1 and AR 872/7-1) from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; [https://www.dfg.de/en/index.jsp](https://www.dfg.de/en/index.jsp)). BSS was supported by the DFG through project AR 872/5-1, awarded to SAOA as part of the Research Unit FOR 5026 “InsectInfect”.

## SHAR...,