Fruit Flies Spontaneously Form Orderly Groups

According to new research, opposing desires to congregate and maintain some personal space drive fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to form orderly social clusters.

Drosophila melanogaster. Image credit: Botaurus.

Drosophila melanogaster. Image credit: Botaurus.

Many animals ranging from swarming insects to wildebeests form large, orderly groups.

This collective behavior is often crucial to survival. It may help animals find food, escape predators, enhance the way they sense their surroundings and augment their decision making.

But the processes that enable these group gatherings are not well understood.

It can be difficult to study large animal groups in the wild, but studying smaller animals in the laboratory can help scientists tease apart the processes that drive animal clustering step by step.

In the new research, a team of scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Capital Medical University looked at what drives clustering in fruit flies.

“Analyzing the aggregation process in fruit flies would help us understand how individuals interact to form a social group and what senses are used during this process,” said Lifen Jiang, a PhD student at the University of Science and Technology of China.

“Looking at this process in fruit flies may give us some insight into more complex collective behaviors in other animals.”

Top: (A-C) representative images showing the spatial distributions of flies of genetic control (A), flies with optogenetically-activated ppk neurons (B), and flies with silenced ppk neurons (C). Bottom: the enlarged views of regions in corresponding arenas on the top, marked by red squares. Image credit: Jiang et al, doi: 10.7554/eLife.51921.

Top: (A-C) representative images showing the spatial distributions of flies of genetic control (A), flies with optogenetically-activated ppk neurons (B), and flies with silenced ppk neurons (C). Bottom: the enlarged views of regions in corresponding arenas on the top, marked by red squares. Image credit: Jiang et al, doi: 10.7554/eLife.51921.

In the study, Jiang and colleagues discovered that fruit flies placed in shallow, covered dishes spontaneously form clusters with regular spacing between flies.

By observing the flies, the researchers learned that these formations are driven by fly-fly interactions in which the flies use their legs and wings to touch each other and then establish some personal space.

But when the team systematically interfered with their senses, including sight, odor and touch, this stopped the flies from forming these neat clusters.

“Depriving fruit flies of their senses resulted in abnormal responses to encountering another fly and a high failure rate of cluster formation,” Jiang said.

The study authors then showed that the fruit flies’ physical interactions with each other switch on their sensory nerve cells.

Without these cells, the flies are unable to establish the usual socially acceptable distances between themselves and other flies that are necessary to form organized clusters.

“Our findings suggest that self-organization in flies might rely on just a few simple rules,” said Professor Yan Zhu, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics.

“More studies are now needed to determine whether similar rules govern gatherings in larger animals.”

The results were published online in the journal eLife.

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Lifen Jiang et al. 2020. Emergence of social cluster by collective pairwise encounters in Drosophila. eLife 9: e51921; doi: 10.7554/eLife.51921

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