Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 68, Issue 5, November 2004, Pages 1165-1180
Animal Behaviour

The role of courtship song in sexual selection and species recognition by female Drosophila melanogaster

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2003.11.023Get rights and content

Male fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, produce a complex courtship display, which females may use to identify conspecifics and to aid in choosing a high-quality mate. Courtship song, consisting of sine and pulse elements, is an important acoustic component of this display. Whereas characteristics that differ between species have been identified, the signals used for intraspecific mate choice remain unknown, as does the function of sine song. To investigate further the role of pulse and sine song, we varied characteristics of artificial and edited songs and played them to groups of flies to determine whether sine or pulse song parameters contribute to female mate choice. Playing artificial songs did not substantially change the amount of male courtship behaviour. Sine song in any proportion had no effect on female mating propensity, nor was mating affected by sine-song frequency. The amount of pulse song offered positively increased mating, up to a threshold, without regard to the structure of the song, pulse carrier frequency, or interpulse interval. These results indicate that females use pulse song, not sine song, for both species identification and intraspecific mate choice. Males may continue to produce sine song as a relic, as a by-product of a physiological process or because it is inextricably linked to a mate-choice signal in a different modality. The role of song memory is discussed briefly.

Section snippets

Stocks and culture

Two wild-type stocks were used. To produce the first, equal numbers of males and females from each of six nonmutant cultures (Argyle, PBS Israel, Z53, Canton-S, Chateau Tahbilk and Nairobi) were allowed to interbreed freely. This resulted in a mixed wild-type stock, which grew vigorously and was maintained in mass culture. When the mixed wild-type stock was not used, Canton-S flies were used instead.

Flies were raised on a medium containing cornmeal, malt, yeast and molasses, with propionic acid

Is song playback effective?

Playback of artificial or recorded song to females in the presence of wingless males partially rescued mating compared with that found in the presence of wingless males without playback (negative controls). Mating levels never achieved that seen when females were exposed to normal song produced by males with wings (winged males, considered positive controls; Figure 2, Talyn and Dowse, 2003).

Is courtship effort affected by courtship song?

Male CE varied within and across sets and experiments, but largely in a treatment (song type)-independent

Pulse song and duty cycle

We report evidence that females use pulse song duty cycle to select among conspecifics, preferring more energetic songs (more pulse trains per unit time or longer pulse trains). This is reasonable, because larger D. melanogaster males produce longer pulse trains (Ewing, 1964, Partridge et al., 1987a) and are more attractive to females (Partridge and Farquhar, 1983, Partridge et al., 1987b, Pitnick, 1991). Preference for high duty cycle is also common in other species. For example, female grey

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Nancy Curtis, C.-F. Wu and the Bloomington Stock Center for providing flies; and to meteorologist Steve McKay (Channel 2, Bangor, Maine, U.S.A.), who provided some of the barometric pressure data. Thanks to Jim Benedix for valuable conversation; to Daphne Fairbairn, Wade Hazel, Jeff Hall, Sue Morris, John Ringo, Ann Hedrick and two anonymous referees for comments on the manuscript; and to Wordsworth Typing and Editing Services, Plainfield, Vermont, U.S.A. for providing

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    H. B. Dowse is at the Department of Biological Sciences, 5751 Murray Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5751, U.S.A.

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