Odors Help Fruit Flies Escape Parasitoid Wasps

摘要

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 larvae grow, they consume their hosts from the inside. But fruit flies are far from defenseless against their wasp enemies. In this issue of PLOS Biology, Hansson, Knaden, and colleagues show that Drosophila melanogaster mothers and larvae have tightly-focused tactics for sniffing out and evading Leptopilina.