A fruit called the noni -- now hyped for a vast array of unproven health benefits -- is distinctly unhealthy for the fruit fly, which has fascinated geneticists for a century. For the species of Drosophila that lives in labs around the world, noni signifies extermination² with extreme prejudice: A fly will die if it eats yeast³ growing on noni. And yet when collectors swung nets and baited traps with rotting banana on a small island between Madagascar and Africa, they found a close relative, Drosophila yakuba, that merrily gobbles yeast growing on these forbidden fruits.

 

Yeast growing on noni are the centerpiece on the islander fly's menu. But on the mainland, "D. yakuba is happy with whatever rotting fruit it can find, as long as it's not toxic⁴," says John Pool, an assistant professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "They scrape off the yeast cells that grow on rotting fruit and eat them, and their larvae⁵ swim through the rotting fruit." Pool is senior author of a study on the discovery that appears in the April 4, 2016 Proceedings⁶ of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Pool says the toxin-surviving fruit flies on Mayotte are likely to become an important research subject for studying the evolution of dietary changes, "where we can borrow the genetic¹ tools of the common laboratory fruit fly."

 

The fruit fly is a workhorse of genetics, but "most fruit fly labs focus on experiments with a small set of lab strains," Pool says. "Our interest is using fruit flies to learn about evolution in the field." Because a different fruit fly had also evolved immunity⁷ to noni, "Yakuba gives us a chance to ask, how predictable are these transitions? Will they use the same genes⁸, or do these organisms have a wider palette so they can make a completely different choice next time?"

 

A collection effort on the island of Mayotte, led by Jean David of the French National Center for Scientific Research, identified the unusual Drosophila yakuba population and its bizarre preference for noni. 

 

Island species have played a key role in evolutionary⁹ biology since Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos. "Arriving organisms find that life is different, food is different, they have to interact with different species," Pool says. "They interbreed less, if at all, with their mainland cousins, and for all these reasons, they are more free to go in different evolutionary directions."

 

Female yakuba flies on Mayotte prefer not to mate with mainland males, Pool says, helping¹⁰ establish the reproductive isolation¹¹ that supports evolution of a new species.

 

"There were probably not that many options when these flies reached Mayotte," says Pool, "so they were stuck trying to survive on this toxic fruit."

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