A courtship behavior that makes monandrous females polyandrous

Females of many animal species mate several times with different males (polyandry), whereas females of some species mate with a single male (monandry) only once. Little is known about the mechanisms by which these different mating systems evolve. Females of Drosophila prolongata mate serially, unlike D. melanogaster females that refuse to remate for several days after their first mating (remating suppression, RS). Nevertheless, interestingly, non-virgin D. prolongata females refuse to remate with males that are prohibited from performing their species-specific courtship behavior, leg vibration (LV), suggesting that LV overrides RS making it cryptic in D. prolongata. In this study, we examined how long this cryptic RS persists. Surprisingly, it was sustained for at least two weeks, showing that RS is substantially augmented in D. prolongata compared to that of D. melanogaster. The two most closely related species to D. prolongata, D. rhopaloa and D. carrolli, do not perform LV and showed...