Love hurts -- especially for the female fruit fly. A new linkurl:study;http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122208568/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 published online in the __Journal of Evolutionary Biology__ shows that after fruit flies mate, females ramp up their immune systems in roughly the same fashion as they do when fighting bacterial and fungal infections. "Of course the immune system is there to fight pathogens, but it might be there to protect you against members of your own species, too," linkurl:Ted Morrow,;http://www.iee.uu.se/zooekol/default.php?type=personalpage&lang=en&id=119 an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who led the study, told __The Scientist__. "It's an exciting and very clever study," said linkurl:Andrew Stewart,;http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/~long/rice_lab.html a University of California, Santa Barbara, evolutionary biologist, who was not involved in the work. "It gets at some of the areas in sexual conflict where we don't really know what's going on."
In the fruit fly __Drosophila melanogaster__, sex is a fairly dangerous game. Females that mate...
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