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Observatory

Female Fruit Flies Like One Mate, or His Brother

Credit...Chris Gash

The love life of the fruit fly? It’s complicated.

In a new paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B, British researchers report that while male fruit flies do not like to mate with the same female twice, females prefer to mate with the same male.

And while females will also mate with the brother of a previous mate, males avoid mating with a mate’s sister.  

The study of how the flies respond to the relatives of previous mates is the first to look at the “in-law effect,” said one of the authors, Cedric K. W. Tan, a zoologist at the University of Oxford.

For the study, which was part of his doctoral research, he painstakingly painted the flies different colors to identify the mates and their brothers and sisters.

When he and his colleagues toyed with the flies’ sense of smell, the responses changed a bit. Mutated flies with no sense of smell have a weaker response to relatives, Dr. Tan said. Males are less likely to reject known females, and females are less likely to go after familiar males.

This suggests that flies are also relying on sight and sound to identify sexual partners. Still, the study shows smell must be important to the flies’ courtship.

“The sense of smell helps to distinguish individuals,” Dr. Tan said. “There are shared smells between relatives.”

 

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Insects: Female Fruit Flies Like One Mate, or His Brother. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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