ABSTRACT
The non-pest fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster Meigen feeds on the yeasts growing on already damaged fruit and lays eggs on it, but the flies do not themselves cause damage. Adaptation to factory conditions has been found for pre-adult development time of the melon fly Bactrocera cucurbitae. Much information is available on mechanisms of sexual selection and life history evolution in D. melanogaster. It may therefore have some useful messages for design of control or eradication measures for the pest species. When fruit flies are taken from the field and used to found a factory mass-rearing strain, there can be failures and those lines that do establish can go through a severe bottleneck in numbers, presumably as they adapt to the conditions in the mass-rearing facility. The difficulty in establishing factory strains implies that the conditions they encounter in the mass-rearing facility are different from those in nature. Possible differences include food, oviposition substrate, diurnal light rhythms and conditions during mating.
