Abstract
Aggressive behaviours occur throughout the animal kingdom and agonistic contests often govern access to resources. Nutrition experienced during development has the potential to influence aggressive behaviours in adults through effects on growth, energy budgets and an individual’s internal state. In particular, resource-poor developmental nutrition might decrease adult aggression by limiting growth and energy budgets, or alternatively might increase adult aggression by enhancing motivation to compete for resources. However, the direction of this relationship—and effects of developmental nutrition experienced by rivals—remains unknown in most species, limiting understanding of how early-life environments contribute to variation in aggression. We investigated these alternative hypotheses by assessing male-male aggression in adult fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, that developed on a low-, medium- or high-resource diet, manipulated via yeast content. We found that a low-resource developmental diet reduced the probability of aggressive lunges in adults, as well as threat displays against rivals that developed on a low-resource diet. These effects appeared to be independent of diet-related differences in body mass. Males performed relatively more aggression on a central food patch when facing rivals of a low-resource diet, suggesting that developmental diet affects aggressive interactions through social effects in addition to individual effects. Our finding that resource-poor developmental diets reduce male-male aggression in D. melanogaster is consistent with the idea that resource budgets mediate aggression and in a mass-independent manner. Our study improves understanding of the links between nutrition and aggression.Significance statementEarly-life nutrition can influence social behaviours in adults. Aggression is a widespread social behaviour with important consequences for fitness. Using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, we show that a poor developmental diet reduces aspects of adult aggressive behaviour in males. Furthermore, males perform more aggression near food patches when facing rivals of poor nutrition. This suggests that early-life nutrition affects aggressive interactions through social effects in addition to individual effects.
Highlights
Aggression is widespread amongst animals, including humans, where aggressive behaviours have detrimental effects on societies (Blanchard and Blanchard 2003; Sluyter et al 2003; Georgiev et al 2013)
For aggressive behaviour that showed a significant response to focal or rival developmental diet, we further explored whether body mass had an effect on aggression above and beyond that of developmental diet, using simplified models including only focal or rival diet, and the corresponding mass, conducting sequential sum of squares analysis to test the effect of mass after the main effects of developmental diet had been accounted for
We found that developmental diet influenced adult male aggression in D. melanogaster: a low-resource developmental diet reduced the likelihood of aggressive lunging and wing threats
Summary
Aggression is widespread amongst animals (e.g. mammals, Sinn et al 2008; birds, Johnsen and Zuk 1995; fish, Neat et al 1998; Seebacher et al 2013; invertebrates, Brown et al 2007; Elias et al 2010), including humans, where aggressive behaviours have detrimental effects on societies (Blanchard and Blanchard 2003; Sluyter et al 2003; Georgiev et al 2013). Early life is key for nutrient acquisition, and the balance of nutrients in this critical period can have profound effects on body mass, resource allocation to adult traits, and internal state (Royle et al 2005; Amitin and Pitnick 2007; Zikovitz and Agrawal 2013; Lihoreau et al 2015; Pillay et al 2016; Han and Dingemanse 2017) These effects can determine the relative ability (i.e. resource-holding potential) and motivation (i.e. resource valuation, the value of a contested resource; Elias et al 2010; Stockermans and Hardy 2013; Gruber et al 2016) to invest in aggressive contests and the fitness pay-offs from doing so. Consistent with this prediction, there is evidence that early-life diet influences levels of aggression and antisocial behaviours in humans and non-human vertebrates (Wallner and Machatschke 2009)
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