TY - JOUR
T1 - Coping with Space Neophobia in Drosophila melanogaster
T2 - The Asymmetric Dynamics of Crossing a Doorway to the Untrodden
AU - Cohen, Shay
AU - Benjamini, Yoav
AU - Golani, Ilan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Cohen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2015/12/1
Y1 - 2015/12/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84955582237&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0140207
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0140207
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AN - SCOPUS:84955582237
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 10
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 12
M1 - e0140207
ER -