DOI: 10.5061/dryad.qbzkh18s6
title: Data from: Socially plastic responses in females are robust to evolutionary manipulations of adult sex ratio and adult nutrition

description: Socially plastic behaviours are widespread among animals and can have a
 significant impact on fitness. Here we investigated whether the socially
 plastic responses of female Drosophila melanogaster can evolve in
 predictable ways following long term manipulation of adult sex ratio and
 adult nutrient availability. Previous reports show that female D.
 melanogaster respond plastically to their same-sex social environment, and
 lay significantly fewer eggs after mating when previously exposed to other
 females. In this study, we tested two hypotheses, using females drawn from
 lines with an evolutionary history of exposure to variation in adult sex
 ratio (male biased, female biased, or equal sex ratio) and adult
 nutritional environment (high or low quality). The first was that a
 history of elevated competition in female-biased regimes would select for
 increased plastic fecundity responses in comparison to females from other
 lines. The second was that these responses would also be magnified under
 poor nutritional resource regimes. Neither hypothesis was supported.
 Instead, we found that plastic fecundity responses were retained in
 females from all lines, and did not differ significantly across any of
 them. The lack of differences does not appear to be due to insufficient
 selection, as we did observe significant evolutionary responses in virgin
 egg laying patterns according to sex ratio and nutritional regime. The
 lack of variation in the magnitude of predicted plasticity is consistent
 with the idea that the costs of maintaining plasticity are low, benefits
 high, and that plasticity itself can be relatively hard-wired.
description: Dataset collected as described in the methods. Processing
 according to the statistical pipelines described. All statistical analysis
 was performed using R Core team V-4.0.2 (2020 2020). All three replicates
 were analysed simultaneously, with the replicates (‘Population’)
 designated as a random factor. The Shapiro-Wilk test, Q-Q plots, and
 histograms were used to check data were normally distributed and the
 Levene’s test to check the homogeneity of variances across treatments.
 Analysis of egg number and progeny were analysed using linear mixed
 effects models from the lme4 package (Bates et al. 2015) and Chi-squared
 test were used to drop non-significant terms (supplementary material).
 Mating latency and duration were also analysed using the same method after
 being log10 transformed. To analyse differences between group treatments,
 a Tukey post hoc analysis was conducted using the ‘emmeans’ package (Lenth
 2022). Additionally, a Generalized Linear Mixed Effects Model (GLMER) with
 a Poisson error distribution, and a negative binomial GLMER were used to
 check model fit versus the LMER. The GLMER with poisson structure did not
 fit the data well, whilst the negative binomial reported similar results
 to the LMER. Models were compared using Log-likelihood, Akaike’s
 information criterion (AIC) and residual plots. The data were initially
 analysed using the whole dataset. In subsequent analyses, zero egg counts
 were removed to allow the data for the egg laying and non egg laying
 females to be analysed separately, using a binomial generalised linear
 mixed model. For virgin egg data, it was not distinguish between the eggs
 laid by focal and non-focal females in the grouped treatments. Therefore,
 we analysed the virgin egg count data separately for alone and grouped
 treatments.
description: # Data from: Socially plastic responses in females are robust to
 evolutionary manipulations of adult sex ratio and adult nutrition J
 Evolutionary Biology (2024). Authors: McConnell N, Haerty W, Gage MJG,
 Chapman T
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qbzkh18s6](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qbzkh18s6) ### **SREXPdata1:** The mating duration, mating latency and number of offspring of female *Drosophila melanogaster* experimentally evolved under fixed adult sex ratio that was either male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB), and either a standard (100 % of standard diet yeast) or poor (20% of standard diet yeast) dietary regime. Females were exposed to 3 conspecific rival females for 3 days before mating (G) or housed alone (A). All rival females and males mated to the focal females were wildtype. **SREXPdata1** contains the following data columns: | Population: Label for evolutionary regime, replicate and food type; male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB) ; Low nutrition (20) High nutrition (100), replicate 1,2 or 3 | | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **code**:  Label for evolutionary regime, replicate and food type; male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB) ; Low nutrition (20) High nutrition (100), and social treatment | | **Sex.Ratio**: Label for sex ratio either male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB) | | **Food:** Label for Low nutrition (20% of standard) High nutrition (100% of standard) | | **Social:** treatment of the focal female either alone (A) or group housed with three non-focal females for 3 days before mating (G)  | | **Start**: Time when the focal female was introduced to the wildtype male (GMT) | | **Mating**: Start of mating between male and female (note: only matings longer than 6min were used) (GMT) | | **End**: time when mating ceased (GMT) | | **Latency**: Time between introduction to male and beginning of mating (mins) | | **Duration**: length of time the mating lasted (mins) | | **loglat:** Latency time converted using Log10 function | | **logdur**: Duration time converted using Log10 function | | **Eggs**: number of eggs produced by focal female in the 24h post mating | | **progeny**: number of eggs that successfully developed into adult flies | | **Egg.viability**: percentage of eggs that successfully developed to adult flies | ### **SREXPdata2**: The virgin egg counts of female *Drosophila melanogaster* experimentally evolved under fixed adult sex ratio that was either male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB), and either a standard (100% of standard diet yeast) or poor (20% of standard diet yeast) dietary regime. Females were exposed to 3 conspecific rival females for 3 days before mating (G) or housed alone (A). All rival females and males mated to the focal females were wildtype. **SREXPdata2** contains the following data columns: | Population: Label for evolutionary regime, replicate and food type; male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB) ; Low nutrition (20) High nutrition (100), replicate 1,2 or 3 | | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **code**:  Label for evolutionary regime, replicate and food type; male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB) ; Low nutrition (20) High nutrition (100), and social treatment | | **Sex.Ratio**: Label for sex ratio either male-biased (MB), equal (EQ) or female-biased (FB) | | **Food**: Label for Low nutrition (20) High nutrition (100) | | **Social**: treatment of the focal female either alone (A) or housed with three non-focal females for 3 days before mating (G)  | | **VirginEggs**: Number of eggs the focal female laid over the three days prior to mating (note: for G females the number of eggs was divided by 4) | ## Description of the data and file structure Design is fully balanced. Missing values = N/A ## Sharing/Access information Data collected as described in the linked paper. Nor derived from any additional sources. ## Code/Software Analysis codes and software are given in the Supplementary Information of the linked paper.