Sensory deficiencies affect resource selection and associational effects at two spatial scales

Many insect species have limited sensory abilities and may not be able to perceive the quality of different resource types while approaching patchily distributed resources. These restrictions may lead to differences in selection rates between separate patches and between different resource types within a patch, which may have consequences for associational effects between resources. In this study, we used an oviposition assay containing different frequencies of apple and banana substrates divided over two patches to compare resource selection rates of wild‐type Drosophila melanogaster at the between‐ and within‐patch scales. Next, we compared the wild‐type behavior with that of the olfactory‐deficient strain Orco 2 and the gustatory‐deficient strain Poxn ΔM22‐B5 and found comparable responses to patch heterogeneity and similarly strong selection rates for apple at both scales for the wild‐type and olfactory‐deficient flies. Their oviposition behavior translated into associational susceptibility for apple and associational resistance for banana. The gustatory‐deficient flies, on the other hand, no longer had a strong selection rate for apple, strongly differed in between‐ and within‐patch selection rates from the wild‐type flies, and caused no associational effects between the resources. Our study suggests that differences in sensory capabilities can affect resource selection at different search behavior scales in different ways and in turn underlie associational effects between resources at different spatial scales.