RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Social foraging extends associative odor-food memory expression in fruit flies (<em>Drosophila melanogaster</em>)
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 636399
DO 10.1101/636399
A1 Aarti Sehdev
A1 Yunusa Mohammed
A1 Cansu Tafrali
A1 Paul Szyszka
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/14/636399.abstract
AB Animals socially interact during foraging to share information about the quality and location of food sources. The mechanisms of social information transfer during foraging have been mostly studied at the behavioral level, and its underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has become a model for studying the neural bases of social information transfer, as fruit flies show a rich repertoire of social behaviors and provide a well-developed genetic toolbox to monitor and manipulate neuronal activity. Social information transfer has already been characterized for fruit flies’ egg laying, mate choice, foraging and aversive associative learning, however the role of social information transfer on associative odor-food learning during foraging are unknown. Here we present an automated foraging assay for groups of walking flies that allows studying the effect of group size on the formation and expression of associative odor-food memories. We found that inter-fly attraction increases with group size and that groups of flies exhibit extended odor-food memory expression, as compared to single or pairs of flies. We discuss possible behavioral and neural mechanisms of this social effect on odor-food memory expression. This study opens up opportunities to investigate how social interactions are relayed in the neural circuitry of learning and memory expression.