The song of a fly… the courtship of another

Drosophila melanogaster image illustrating sexual dimorphism and mating behavior. Credit: TheAlphaWolf (Wikimedia Commons)

Did you know that flies sing? True to the dictum that I just made up – ‘where is song, there is lust’ – it turns out not only that flies can sing, but they even have courtship songs! Granted, since they don’t have a larynx, the male flies sing by vibrating their wings in a certain way, which is unique to each fly species, and females listen with the feather-looking bit on top of their antennae, called arista. The behavior has generated enough research that a fairly hefty review about it has been published two years ago in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, pointing to a gene central to the male courtship circuitry and expressed only in the fly’s neurons, the fru gene (I bet it was called that way because when you make mutants you get fru/fru …).

Zhou et al. (2015) used a series of complicated experiments to successively activate or inhibit the neurons which express the fru gene, in order to identify the neural circuitry underlying hearing and processing the courtship songs. This circuitry is different in males and females, which makes sense since the serenading male expects different behaviors from his audience, depending on their sex; the listening males hurry to compete for the intended female and the females slow down and… listen carefully. Mind wondering: if I was the one serenading, wouldn’t I want to drive away the competitors, instead of drawing them in towards the object of my desire? Perhaps I want the competitors to also engage in courtship behavior so I can show off my wing vibrating prowess… Anyway, digression aside, in addition to figuring out which neuron does what, the authors managed to elicit courtship behavior in the listening males by optogenetically stimulating the 3rd and 4th order neurons in the newly identified circuit.

Besides being strangely interesting in itself, the research fills a gap in the understanding how courtship behavior is recognized, at least in fruit flies, which may be very useful information for other species as well, humans included.

Reference: Zhou, C., Franconville, R., Vaughan, A. G., Robinett, C. C., Jayaraman, V., & Baker, B. S. (21 September 2015). Central neural circuitry mediating courtship song perception in male Drosophila. Elife, 4:1-15. doi: 10.7554/eLife.08477. Article + FREE PDF

For the interested specialist, the MATLAB source code for analyzing calcium-imaging data can be found here.

By Neuronicus, 24 September 2015