Oviposition site preference in Drosophila.

Comparative studies of oviposition site preference (OSP) in Drosophila suggest that choice of oviposition site is an important adaptive behavior which influences individual fitness and the potential of populations for speciation. OSP has been investigated under conditions which provided females with a choice of standard medium or medium containing ethanol for oviposition. OSP is an extremely labile behavior in the laboratory, but a technique has been developed which minimizes variation between replicates and allows the detection of OPS differences between semispecies of a single species. An analysis of the OSP of 14 Drosophila species shows that this behavior is not correlated with phylogenetic relationships. OSP with respect to ethanol may be correlated with the presence of ethanol in the environment and the activity of alcohol dehydrogenase in the species tested.