The adult foraging assay (AFA) detects strain and food-deprivation effects in feeding-related traits of Drosophila melanogaster

[Display omitted] •We present a new Drosophila adult foraging assay (AFA).•The AFA is easy, cost effective, flexible, and uses open source tracker software.•The AFA is effective at teasing apart strain differences in foraging behavior.•We use the rover and sitter strains to measure movement and feed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of insect physiology 2018-04, Vol.106 (Pt 1), p.20-29
Main Authors: Hughson, Bryon N., Anreiter, Ina, Jackson Chornenki, Nicholas L., Murphy, Keith R., Ja, William W., Huber, Robert, Sokolowski, Marla B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult foraging assay
Drosophila melanogaster
Food deprivation
Food search
Ingestion
Thigmotaxis
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Summary:[Display omitted] •We present a new Drosophila adult foraging assay (AFA).•The AFA is easy, cost effective, flexible, and uses open source tracker software.•The AFA is effective at teasing apart strain differences in foraging behavior.•We use the rover and sitter strains to measure movement and feeding patters. We introduce a high-resolution adult foraging assay (AFA) that relates pre- and post-ingestive walking behavior to individual instances of food consumption. We explore the utility of the AFA by taking advantage of established rover and sitter strains known to differ in a number of feeding-related traits. The AFA allows us to effectively distinguish locomotor behavior in Fed and Food-Deprived (FD) rover and sitter foragers. We found that rovers exhibit more exploratory behavior into the center of an arena containing sucrose drops compared to sitters who hug the edges of the arena and exhibit thigmotaxic behavior. Rovers also discover and ingest more sucrose drops than sitters. Sitters become more exploratory with increasing durations of food deprivation and the number of ingestion events also increases progressively with prolonged fasting for both strains. AFA results are matched by strain differences in sucrose responsiveness, starvation resistance, and lipid levels, suggesting that under the same feeding condition, rovers are more motivated to forage than sitters. These findings demonstrate the AFA’s ability to effectively discriminate movement and food ingestion patterns of different strains and feeding treatments.
ISSN:0022-1910
1879-1611
DOI:10.1016/j.jinsphys.2017.08.011