Social environment mediates cancer progression in Drosophila.

The influence of oncogenic phenomena on the ecology and evolution of animal species is becoming an important research topic. Similar to host-pathogen interactions, cancer negatively affects host fitness, which should lead to the selection of host control mechanisms, including behavioral traits that best minimize the proliferation of malignant cells. Social behavior is suggested to influence tumor progression.

Cancer brings forward oviposition in the fly .

Hosts often accelerate their reproductive effort in response to a parasitic infection, especially when their chances of future reproduction decrease with time from the onset of the infection. Because malignancies usually reduce survival, and hence potentially the fitness, it is expected that hosts with early cancer could have evolved to adjust their life-history traits to maximize their immediate reproductive effort. Despite the potential importance of these plastic responses, little attention has been devoted to explore how cancers influence animal reproduction.

Introduced Drosophila subobscura populations perform better than native populations during an oviposition choice task due to increased fecundity but similar learning ability.

The success of invasive species is tightly linked to their fitness in a putatively novel environment. While quantitative components of fitness have been studied extensively in the context of invasive species, fewer studies have looked at qualitative components of fitness, such as behavioral plasticity, and their interaction with quantitative components, despite intuitive benefits over the course of an invasion. In particular, learning is a form of behavioral plasticity that makes it possible to finely tune behavior according to environmental conditions.

Sexual harassment induces a temporary fitness cost but does not constrain the acquisition of environmental information in fruit flies.

Across animals, sexual harassment induces fitness costs for females and males. However, little is known about the cognitive costs involved, i.e.

Ecology of information: social transmission dynamics within groups of non-social insects.

While many studies focus on how animals use public information, the dynamics of information spread and maintenance within groups, i.e. the 'ecology of information', have received little attention.

Social environment influences performance in a cognitive task in natural variants of the foraging gene.

In Drosophila melanogaster, natural genetic variation in the foraging gene affects the foraging behaviour of larval and adult flies, larval reward learning, adult visual learning, and adult aversive training tasks. Sitters (for(s)) are more sedentary and aggregate within food patches whereas rovers (for(R)) have greater movement within and between food patches, suggesting that these natural variants are likely to experience different social environments. We hypothesized that social context would differentially influence rover and sitter behaviour in a cognitive task.

A genetic polymorphism affecting reliance on personal versus public information in a spatial learning task in Drosophila melanogaster.

Organisms that face behavioural challenges can use different types of information to guide their decisions. First, they can use the personal information they sample in their environment. Second, they can use the inadvertent social information provided by the behaviour of conspecifics or heterospecifics (i.

Functional and evolutionary trade-offs co-occur between two consolidated memory phases in Drosophila melanogaster.

Memory is a complex and dynamic process that is composed of different phases. Its evolution under natural selection probably depends on a balance between fitness benefits and costs. In Drosophila, two separate forms of consolidated memory phases can be generated experimentally: anaesthesia-resistant memory (ARM) and long-term memory (LTM).

Spread of social information and dynamics of social transmission within Drosophila groups.

Understanding how behavioral diversity arises and is maintained is central to evolutionary biology. Genetically based inheritance has been a predominant research focus of the last century; however, nongenetic inheritance, such as social transmission, has become a topic of increasing interest [1]. How social information impacts behavior depends on the balance between information gathered directly through personal experience versus that gleaned through social interactions and on the diffusion of this information within groups [2, 3].