Fig 1.
Eggs collected from an outbred population reared on maintenance diet (M) were seeded on H and L diets for development. Emerged flies from each treatment were split to H and L diets as adults in two large cage replicates for each treatment (NCAGES = 8). From each cage we measured fecundity and lifespan.
Table 1.
Summary of survival, lifetime, and per female fecundity in each larval-adult treatment group.
Fig 2.
Probability of survival grouped by larval-adult diet regime and sex.
Broken lines depict age (days) at median survival probability. Survival responded in an age-specific manner to treatment combinations, and differently between the sexes.
Table 2.
Model comparison.
Table 3.
Summary of reproductive values across four treatments.
Fig 3.
Pattern of egg output in each treatment of larval-adult diet regime. a-c: Mean age-specific fecundity (i.e., mean number of eggs laid in a 3-hour period in each diet regime over lifespan is plotted.
Lines are linear models of those diets; d-f: same data in a-c calculated per female; c,f: are estimated regime effects calculated from regressing numbers of eggs on regime, ether in group fecundity c or per female fecundity f.
Fig 4.
Effect of regime on lifetime fecundity in D. melanogaster. Hedge’s d statistic for pairwise regime comparisons.
Positive effects reflect a larger effect (mean) of the first diet sequence before ‘vs’ while negative effects reflect a larger effect of the second sequence. We interpret these results as d < 0.2 (small effect), 0.2 ≤ d < 0.5 (medium effect), 0.5 ≤ d < 0.8 (large effect), and d ≥ 0.8 (very large effect) (Hedges and Olkin, 1985).
Fig 5.
Average number of eggs per female per day calculated from 3-hour laying periods sampled 3 times a week over lifetime. a – grouped by larval treatment H or L. b – grouped by adult treatment H or L. c – Mean difference in egg number per 3-hour laying period in each regime. d – Number of detected change points in egg-laying and duration of these periods.
Fig 6.
Age-specific fecundity patterns in each of the four diet combinations.
A reproductive value is the expected per 3-hour fecundity of a female calculated from lifespan-fecundity Leslie matrices. The dots represent mean per female fecundity at each sampling time over the lifespan.