On the use of private versus social information in oviposition site choice decisions by Drosophila melanogaster females

Individuals are faced with decisions throughout their lifetimes, and the choices they make often have important consequences towards their fitness. Being able to discern which available option is best to pursue often incurs sampling costs, which may be largely avoided by copying the behaviour and decisions of others. Although social learning and copying behaviours are widespread, much remains unknown about how effective and adaptive copying behaviour is, as well as the factors that underlie its expression. Recently, it has been suggested that since female fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) appear to rely heavily on public information when selecting oviposition sites, they are a promising model system for researching patch-choice copying, and more generally, the mechanisms that control decision-making. Here, we set out to determine how well female distinguish between socially-produced cues, and whether females are using ‘relevant’ signals when choosing an oviposition site. We found th...