Diet Shapes Mortality Response to Trauma in Old Tephritid Fruit Flies

• Published in: PloS one 2016-07, Vol.11 (7), p.e0158468-e0158468
• Main Authors: Carey, James R, Liedo, Pablo, Xu, Cong, Wang, Jane-Ling, Müller, Hans-Georg, Su, Yu-Ru, Vaupel, James W
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age; Aging; Algorithms; Anastrepha ludens; Animals; Behavior, Animal; Biology and Life Sciences; Caloric Restriction; Demographics; Demography; Diet; Drosophila; Drosophila melanogaster; Ecological monitoring; Ecology; Ecology and Environmental Sciences; Experiments; Female; Females; Fertility - physiology; Food and nutrition; Frailty; Fruit flies; Fruit flies (Tephritidae); Fruits; Gender; Geriatrics; Germany; Gerontology; Insects; Life span; Longevity; Longevity - physiology; Male; Males; Medical research; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mortality; People and Places; Physiological aspects; Proportional Hazards Models; Research and Analysis Methods; Science; Sex Factors; Stress, Physiological; Sugar; Tephritidae - physiology; Trauma; United States
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0158468

Despite the importance of trauma in healthspan and lifespan in humans as well as in non-human species, with one important exception the literature in both gerontology and ecology contains virtually no experimental demographic studies concerned with trauma in any species. We used dietary manipulation [full diet (F) versus sugar-only (S)] to produce four levels of frailty in 55-day old tephritid fruit flies (Anastrepha ludens) that were then subject to the trauma of cage transfer stress (n = 900/sex in each of the 4 treatments). The key results included the following: (1) there is a trauma effect caused by the transfer that depends on previous diet before transfer, new diet after transfer and gender of the fly; (2) males are more vulnerable than females; (3) if initial diet was F, flies are relatively immune against the trauma, and the subsequent diet (F or S) does not matter; (4) however if initial diet was S, then the effect of the trauma depends largely on the diet after the transfer; (5) flies transferred from S to F diets do very well in terms of remaining longevity (i.e. greatest remaining longevity), while flies transferred from S to S diet do poorly (i.e. shortest remaining longevity). We discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of this study and implications of the results.