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Aggression and courtship in Drosophila: pheromonal communication and sex recognition

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Abstract

Upon encountering a conspecific in the wild, males have to rapidly detect, integrate and process the most relevant signals to evoke an appropriate behavioral response. Courtship and aggression are the most important social behaviors in nature for procreation and survival: for males, making the right choice between the two depends on the ability to identify the sex of the other individual. In flies as in most species, males court females and attack other males. Although many sensory modalities are involved in sex recognition, chemosensory communication mediated by specific molecules that serve as pheromones plays a key role in helping males distinguish between courtship and aggression targets. The chemosensory signals used by flies include volatile and non-volatile compounds, detected by the olfactory and gustatory systems. Recently, several putative olfactory and gustatory receptors have been identified that play key roles in sex recognition, allowing investigators to begin to map the neuronal circuits that convey this sensory information to higher processing centers in the brain. Here, we describe how Drosophila melanogaster males use taste and smell to make correct behavioral choices.

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Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure for us to write this review to honor John Hildebrand on the celebration of his 70th birthday. John is a particularly close friend of one of us (EAK), beginning with his post-doctoral days in the Kravitz lab at Harvard Medical School from 1969 to 1972, and continuing to the present day. As a key Internet node on the “joke network”, John lightens the daily woes of his many friends all over the world. He is a true biologist, a rare scientific find in the ever over-specialized neurobiology community, and I credit him with being the key person in my metamorphosis into a neuroethologist. We raise our glasses to John, a multiply honored scientist, a leader in the field of insect neuroethology, a responsible citizen of the greater scientific community, a champion of opening access to minorities for scientific careers, and a leader in neuroscience education throughout the world. Here is a small contribution dedicated to John about our foray into the world of animal chemical communication.

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  1. Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    María Paz Fernández & Edward A. Kravitz

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  1. María Paz Fernández
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  2. Edward A. Kravitz
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Correspondence to María Paz Fernández.

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Fernández, M.P., Kravitz, E.A. Aggression and courtship in Drosophila: pheromonal communication and sex recognition. J Comp Physiol A 199, 1065–1076 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-013-0851-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-013-0851-5

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