DOI: 10.5061/dryad.3q332
title: Data from: Reproductive and post-reproductive life history of wild-caught Drosophila melanogaster under laboratory conditions

description: The life history of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is well
 understood, but fitness components are rarely measured by following single
 individuals over their lifetime, thereby limiting insights into lifetime
 reproductive success, reproductive senescence and post-reproductive
 lifespan. Moreover, most studies have examined long-established laboratory
 strains rather than freshly caught individuals and may thus be confounded
 by adaptation to laboratory culture, inbreeding or mutation accumulation.
 Here, we have followed the life histories of individual females from three
 recently caught, non-laboratory-adapted wild populations of D.
 melanogaster. Populations varied in a number of life-history traits,
 including ovariole number, fecundity, hatchability and lifespan. To
 describe individual patterns of age-specific fecundity, we developed a new
 model that allowed us to distinguish four phases during a female's
 life: a phase of reproductive maturation, followed by a period of linear
 and then exponential decline in fecundity and, finally, a post-ovipository
 period. Individual females exhibited clear-cut fecundity peaks, which
 contrasts with previous analyses, and post-peak levels of fecundity
 declined independently of how long females lived. Notably, females had a
 pronounced post-reproductive lifespan, which on average made up 40% of
 total lifespan. Post-reproductive lifespan did not differ among
 populations and was not correlated with reproductive fitness components,
 supporting the hypothesis that this period is a highly variable, random
 ‘add-on’ at the end of reproductive life rather than a correlate of
 selection on reproductive fitness. Most life-history traits were
 positively correlated, a pattern that might be due to genotype by
 environment interactions when wild flies are brought into a novel
 laboratory environment but that is unlikely explained by inbreeding or
 positive mutational covariance caused by mutation accumulation.
description: Raw Data Klepsatel et
 alWe
 followed the life histories of a large number of individual females,
 derived from three recently caught, geographically distinct wild
 populations from Austria, Zambia and South Africa over their lifetime. We
 measured ovariole number, fecundity (daily number of eggs), hatchability
 (of the offspring of the experimental females) as a function of maternal
 age, and lifespan (age at death) of experimental females under optimal
 laboratory conditions. Here we present the demographic raw data for these
 traits/measurements; each line represents an individual female fly. Fom
 these raw data, we then estimated individual lifetime fecundity, total
 lifetime production of viable eggs, and the length of the reproductive and
 post-reproductive period (these estimates are not shown here but can be
 found in our publication). For details see our paper, Klepsatel et al.
 (2013) in Journal of Evolutionary Biology. For additional, more specific
 (sub-)datasets based on the raw data presented here (e.g., data for
 survival analysis based on the distribution of age at death), which we
 have used for particular statistical analyses, or for statistical analyses
 outputs please contact the corresponding author, Thomas Flatt at
 thomas.flatt@unil.ch