Finding a spot for her babies to grow up can be perilous for a female fruit fly. The wrong choice can sentence most of them to death at the "hands" of another insect mother, a wasp that is likewise searching for a nursery for her young (Fig 1). Wasps in the genus Leptopilina, which are the main parasitoids of Drosophila, lay their eggs in up to 80% of fruit fly larvae in the wild. As the wasp l...

The recently growing interest in studying flight behaviours of fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, has highlighted the need for developing tools that acquire quantitative motion data. Despite recent advance of video tracking systems, acquiring a flying fly's orientation remains a challenge for these tools. In this paper, we present a novel method for estimating individual flying fly's orienta...

In traditional deterministic models the conditions for the evolution of sex and sexual behavior are limited because their benefits are context dependent. In novel and adverse environments both multiple mating and recombination can help generate gene combinations that allow for rapid adaptation. Mating frequency often increases in conditions in which recombination might be beneficial; therefore,...

Medflies (Ceratitis capitata) are among the world’s most economically harmful pests. In addition, the costs of worldwide monitoring and control are expensive, exceeding $800 million per year in Israel and the U.S. alone. Efficient traps are vitally important tools for medfly quarantine and pest management activities. They are needed for control as well as early detection, for predicting dispers...

Sperm have been studied for their obvious role in fertilization and as a model system for cell-cell interactions and cell signaling. Despite its central and critical role in reproduction, we know surprisingly little about the overall molecular composition of sperm. Interest in sperm function has greatly intensified for two reasons: first, it is becoming increasingly apparent that human infertil...

Fopius arisanus (Sonan) is an important parasitoid of Tephritid fruit flies for at least two reasons. First, it is the one of only three opiine parasitoids known to infect the host during the egg stage(1). Second, it has a wide range of potential fruit fly hosts. Perhaps due to its life history, F. arisanus has been a successfully used for biological control of fruit flies in multiple tropical ...

Effects of different concentrations of GF-120 NF Naturalyte Fruit Fly Bait on attraction and feeding responses, mortality, and control of the western cherry fruit fly, Rhagoletis indifferens Curran, were determined. In the laboratory, flies that had been exposed to sugar and yeast extract and then deprived of all food for 16-20 h were attracted to 40.0% GF-120, but not to 0.6 and 4.8% GF-120 (v...