ABOVE: When stripped of their pheromone-laced coatings, Drosophila eggs can be found by predatory larvae.
ROSHAN VIJENDRAVARMA
The paper
S. Narasimha et al., “Drosophila melanogaster cloak their eggs with pheromones, which prevents cannibalism,” PLOS Biol, 17:e2006012, 2019.
Pheromones in the animal kingdom are often associated with sex, but are also widely used for nonsexual behaviors such as nest guarding, foraging, navigation—for example, by following a pheromone trail left by another animal—and communication. A curious observation led Roshan Vijendravarma, an evolutionary biologist at the Institut Curie, Paris, and his colleagues to investigate whether pheromones might also be deployed to hide eggs from predators.
The researchers saw that starved Drosophila melanogaster larvae seldom attacked eggs laid by conspecifics, despite being voracious predators that regularly attack their own older sibling larvae shortly after hatching. To find out why, the team analyzed fruit fly eggs using high-resolution mass spectrometry and found a thin layer of ...
