Courtship is both risky and essential for survival. Animals use multimodal sensory cues to detect and recognize potential mates and distinguish them from potential competitors or predators. Making this distinction is crucial, as mistakes can be fatal. Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) hang out on ripe fruits together with many other flies from the same species and other drosophilid species. Competition for food and sexual partners is inevitable in such crowds. A courting male must remain close to the female he is courting to beat males competing for the same female, and to do that he relies on visual cues. On the other hand, a distant animal is perceived as a small visual object devoid of chemosensory signature and Drosophila males turn away from it. Visual cues are crucial for courtship and avoidance in fruit flies. Using robust behavioral paradigms that include the traditional single-pair courtship assay as well as novel assays, we aim to delineate and characterize neural circuits processing visual cues that orchestrate courtship, and avoidance in fruit flies.
Institute of Medical Psychology