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...个体在一生中均需面临各类决策，其所作出的选择往往对自身适合度（fitness）具有重要影响。若要辨别当前最优的可选方案，通常需付出信息采样成本，而通过效仿他人的行为与决策，则可大幅规避此类成本。尽管社会学习（social learning）与效仿行为广泛存在，但关于效仿行为的有效性与适应性，以及驱动其表达的潜在因素，目前仍有诸多未知之处。近期有研究指出，由于雌性黑腹果蝇（Drosophila melanogaster）在选择产卵位点（oviposition site）时会大量依赖公共信息，因此其是研究斑块选择效仿（patch-choice copying）行为，乃至更广泛的决策控制机制的理想模型系统。本研究旨在探明雌性果蝇能否有效区分社会来源的线索，以及它们在选择产卵位点时是否会使用‘相关’信号。本研究发现……