Figure 5.

Duration of male–female interaction affects male survivorship post infection. Kaplan-Meier plots of survivorship of males differing in their duration of interaction with females. We generated three treatments- Males had no interaction with females and were held as virgins or Males and females interacted for one hour only or Males and females interacted for two days continuously (see section (f) in Methods for further details). The three types of males were then infected with Pe (n = 50 flies per treatment) and their survivorship post infection was monitored. Cox proportion regression was used to analyze data. Survivorship of Virgins (□) was not different from that of males held with females for one hour (○) (p = 0.99, Cox proportion regression). Males constantly held with females for two days (■) survived significantly better than both virgins (□) (p = 0.04, Cox proportion regression analysis) and males held with females for one hour (○) (p = 0.03, Cox proportion regression analysis). None of the sham infected controls died. Again, as in the previous figures, even though we had three different sham infected controls, we represent all of them using a single line (―――) in the figure.