eavesdropping
edyong | April 10, 2009We get a lot of information from watching other people. We read reviews, we follow links to recommended websites and we listen when our friends vouch for strangers. The opinions of strangers may even be a better guide to the things that make us happy than our own predictions. But humans aren't the only species to make decisions based on information gleaned from our peers - even animals as supposedly simple as flies can do the same.
Frederic Mery from LEGS (the Laboratory of Evolution, Genomes and Speciation) studied the fly Drosophila melanogaster and found that females have a tendency to…