Question

Does the ability to choose a mate improve offspring fitness in fruit flies? researchers have studied this by taking female fruit flies and randomly dividing them into two groups; one group is put into a cage with a large number of males and able to freely choose who to mate with, while flies in the other group are each put into individual vials, each with only one male, giving no choice in who to mate with. females are then put into egg laying chambers, and a certain number of larvae collected. do the larvae from the mate choice group exhibit higher survival rates? a study1 published in nature found that mate choice does increase offspring fitness in fruit flies, yet this result went against conventional wisdom in genetics and was quite controversial. researchers attempted to replicate this result with a series of related experiments2 with data provided in matechoice. the second study was actually a series of three different experiments, and each full experiment was comprised of 50 different mini-experiments (runs), 10 each on five different days.

Answer 1

The ability to choose a mate does improve offspring fitness in fruit flies. The choice made by the female fruit fly is based on a recognition pattern of the male's ability to highlight its potency and "genes". As a conclusion, the better the male's genes, the better the offspring's fitness.