🦟Why do flies fall in love? 💕Researchers tease out the signals behind fruit fly courtship songs

Like a Valentine’s Day dinner or a box of chocolates, male fruit flies have their own rituals for wooing a potential mate.
As part of a complex courtship behavior, male flies vibrate their wings to produce a distinctive song that conveys a message to nearby females. Using internal information and cues from females and the environment, males decide moment to moment whether to sing and how.
Although scientists now know a lot about how fly movements produce songs, it was still not clear which cells and circuits in the fly’s nervous system enable the behavior.
Now, using a suite of novel tools, including a custom-built fly recording studio, Janelia researchers have pinpointed the group of neurons in the nerve cord - a structure analogous to our spinal cord - that produce and pattern the fly’s two major courtship songs. They’ve also measured neuronal activity in these cells while flies were singing to understand how these neurons control each type of song.
The result is an in-depth view of how the fly nervous system coordinates a complex social behavior and generates multiple movements using a common set of muscles - information that could help researchers better understand how other animals, including humans, implement sophisticated actions.
The work also provides a new map of the neurons in the nerve cord required for fly courtship song, enabling researchers worldwide to further probe how the behavior evolved and how signals are produced.
Learn more: www.janelia.org/news/why-do-f...