A. A. Panova et al. / Open Jou r nal of Animal Sciences 3 (2013) 31-35
34
occurred in a group. Being in a group situation, flies
learn to avoid contacts with other individuals because
they are accompanied with threats and fighting playing a
role of negative reinforcement. As a result, flies prefer to
stay in rest than being active.
4. CONCLUSIONS
Previous studies have shown that keeping Drosophila
males in a group leads to increase of aggression and de-
crease of sexual activity in comparison with males kept
individually [10-14,6]. In our research we showed that
previous social experience is extremely important for
further behaviour. Keeping males together for 3 days in
groups of 20 flies leads to a long-term strong reduction
of their locomotor activity maintained for 5 days after
separation. This may be a result of operant learning
similar to learning described earlier [Kamyshev et al.
2002] in females. It was shown that in a group the flies
try to avoid close unpleasant contacts accompanied by
kicks and wing threats from other insects. Therefore,
they run from the individuals, which came too near, and
stop their running to prevent meeting with another fe-
male. Trial and error learning forces them to suppress
their locomotor activity and stay at rest; as a result they
have a less number of unpleasant contacts. But in the
case of females this learning leads to no after-effects in
absence of the appropriate contextual cues. Males, in
contrast, possibly due to more intensive aggression, re-
tain the altered behavior for a long time independently of
the context, in which they experienced aggression from
other individuals.
Ascertainment of underlying physiological and mo-
lecular mechanisms of these phenomena may illuminate
the basic processes of Drosophila social interactions.
These results will help to standardize laboratory proto-
cols of Drosophila housing. Also, the fruit fly, as well as
rodents, can be used as a model for investigation of so-
cial stress and its effects on development of neuropsy-
chiatric disorders.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was supported by grants No. 13-04-02153 and No. 13-04-
12030 from Russian Foundation for Basic Researches, by Programs of
Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences No. 7 and No. 30.
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