Abstract Understanding how insect behaviours studied under controlled laboratory conditions unfold in natural environments remains a major challenge which limits our understanding of the ecological relevance of the studied behaviours. The genetic and molecular mechanisms of social interactions are intensively studied in Drosophila melanogaster , often by exposing flies to group settings for periods ranging from minutes to several days. However, the duration of group formation in the wild remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to assess whether laboratory‐identified social behaviours actually have the temporal opportunity to occur in nature. Using long‐term, high‐resolution field monitoring, we found that groups persist up to ten hours and that the duration of group formation increases with the number of flies but is not modulated by environmental factors such as temperature. These results provide rare empirical evidence for multi‐hour group persistence in wild D. melanogaster , demonstrating that natural conditions can readily support the temporal windows required for many social and reproductive behaviours typically studied in the laboratory. More broadly, our findings highlight that aggregation size may be a key driver of group stability in natural insect populations, advancing efforts to link mechanistic behavioural research with ecological reality.
Kohlmeier et al. (Fri,) studied this question.