Modulatory role of phyto-products in foraging behaviour of Drosophila sp leading to altered reproductive strategies: a novel experimental

Abstract

Fruit flies are important in genetic purview but sometimes are nuisance to household commodity. Therefore, to restrict their uncontrolled trolling a preliminary experiment was conducted using several food items mixed with control (banana) to seek their attractiveness towards the food. Additionally, a thorough observation was made to analyze whether these preferred food items play any significant role in their life cycle stages/phases. The overall data of the present work clearly reveal that phyto products like lemon and turmeric had significant modulatory effects in the life cycle of fruit flies. Further, lemon induced a contrasting feature in fruit flies which was not observed using other food items. Although, the fruit flies were more attracted towards the lemon extract containing food item (higher than any other food item), but after conducting further experiment, it was observed that lemon extract enhanced their phase 1 and phase 3 time period thereby increasing the moulting time taken, however in case of turmeric, the result was opposite. Flies of turmeric set reached adulthood much earlier when compared to control and other experimental set. Thus, these results clearly suggest that lemon extract may have promising usage as natural insecticide for not only fruit flies but also in agriculture industry for various other insects to be investigated in future.