Remember that Wednesday afternoon when lunch was not yet ready and you felt like crying because you were so hungry and the mac and cheese smelt so good? Or Saturday evening after you had skipped lunch and stuffed your face full during dinner? Trust me, I do it too and you know who else behaves in a similar way, fruit flies!
Scientists have thought that long periods of time without food can influence behavior in two main ways. Firstly, it can increase one’s motivation to become more aggressive in order to get food or it can reduce the development of certain traits that can impact fighting ability. On the other hand, fruit flies feed on decaying fruit and often experience long periods of food deprivation. So researchers, Danielle Edmunds, Stuart Wigby and Jennifer C Perry decided to test how food deprivation would affect the fruit flies behavior. They divided the files into 5 groups. For the first group, they did not feed them for about 5 days, the second group did not eat for 3 days, the third group for 2 days, the fourth group for a day and for the files in the last group, they had a food feast.
Then they took pairs of flies from the same food derived group and noted if they would be aggressive towards each other and compared that aggressive behavior to normal behavior of the flies that had the feast.
They found that the files that had not eaten were generally more aggressive, especially those who were deprived of food for 2 or more days. Their observations also showed that all the flies who had not been fed, regardless of how long, spent more time on the food patch eating when compared to those who had been fed throughout the experiment. Remember what I said about stuffing your face after skipping a meal?! Lastly, they found that how long the flies spent on the patch to eat was positively related to how long they had been deprived of food.
These findings suggest that male fruit flies get aggressive when they are hungry, so next time you get hangry, just tell your mum or dad that fruit flies get hangry too and I am sure that they will understand.
References
Danielle Edmunds, Stuart Wigby, Jennifer C. Perry, ‘Hangry’ Drosophila: food deprivation increases male aggression, Animal Behaviour, Volume 177, 2021, Pages 183-190, ISSN 0003-3472, (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347221001378)
