Abstract
We discover and examine within a wide phylogenetic perspective spatial neophobia, avoidance of untrodden terrain, in fruit flies, in an experimental setup that reduces the gap between the field and the laboratory. In our setup, fruit flies use a natal fruit as their origin, freely exploring for days their surroundings, which consists of a mixture of trodden and untrodden terrain. The interface between trodden and untrodden is, however, reduced in our setup to a wide doorway, opened within a surrounding wall. Crossing this doorway, characterized by a sharp contrast interface between trodden and untrodden, generates a behavior whose dynamics betrays the flies' space neophobia. The moment-by-moment dynamics of crossing is remarkably similar to that reported in mouse models of anxiety. This means that neophobic behavior is either homologous across arthropods and vertebrates or, not less interesting, convergent, whereby the same behavior is mediated in the two phyla by two completely different schemata.
Highlights
The remarkable cognitive skills of insects have attracted the attention of naturalists for decades, including the complex routines exhibited by wasps attending to their offspring [1], the intricate navigational capacities exposed in ants [2], and the use of landmarks during return flights to a food source in honey bees [3]
To study the path’s developmental dynamics we performed low level partitioning of the path into progression and lingering segments [17] and higher level partitioning into entries and departures
We plotted the entries successively in order to obtain a view of the developmental dynamics of entries across a session (Video A in S1 File)
Summary
The remarkable cognitive skills of insects have attracted the attention of naturalists for decades, including the complex routines exhibited by wasps attending to their offspring [1], the intricate navigational capacities exposed in ants [2], and the use of landmarks during return flights to a food source in honey bees [3]. Our aim here was to determine whether D. melanogaster distinguishes between visited and not visited (or less visited), areas of an environment; whether it behaves in a neophobic fashion and, if so, to describe the dynamics of the process and to quantify it To achieve these aims it was necessary i) to design an experimental environment that would clearly distinguish between trodden and untrodden (unforeseen) parts of that environment: a gradual increase in activity in the untrodden part of the environment, and a concurrent gradual relative decrease in activity in the well-trodden part would suggest a change in relative preference for each of the two parts, differential recognition of each of them, spatial orientation, and choice between them; ii) to minimize coercion in order not to confound spontaneous and reactive behavior [13]; iii) to determine the time frame that would correspond to the phenomenon’s intrinsic time scale; iv) to represent behavior as a product of a dynamic interaction between the animal and the environment; and v) to allow the operational significance of the behavior to emerge
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