2023-10-22 03:45:02
A vinegar fly (“Drosophila melanogaster”). JEAN LECOMTE / BIOSPHOTO
It’s no secret: the fruit fly is a princess of the laboratory. For geneticists, it has long constituted – and often still constitutes – the animal model par excellence. A generation period of around twelve days and eggs in the hundreds, great simplicity of breeding, a small number of chromosomes (4) make it an ideal terrain for tracking the mechanisms of heredity. Which earned Thomas Morgan and his vinegar flies their first Nobel Prize in 1933. The American biologist stopped there, the insect collected a few others: notably on mutations induced by X-rays (1955), on the mechanisms controlling early embryonic development (1995), on innate immunity (2011) or even on the functioning of biological clocks (2017).
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But does this omnipresence really do justice to his majesty the fly? Is it her own life, her view of the world, the particularities of her behavior that fascinate us or on the contrary what she may have in common with us? To ask the question is to answer it. Like the mouse, like the zebrafish, like the C. elegans worm, Drosophila melanogaster is above all a “model” as precious as it is ultimately close to us.
The insect, however, hides a wealth of behaviors that are unexpected to say the least. Who knows that in times of great silence, when we think we hear the flies flying, as the expression claims, they actually sometimes sing? In an article published on October 11, in the magazine NatureMala Murthy’s team, at Princeton University, has just decoded the different patterns of serenades that males deliver to their beaus at the time of love.
To be completely honest, part of this scoop dates from 1970. In an article published in Scientific American, the British Arthur Ewing and Henry Bennet-Clark then announced to the astonished scientific world that these tiny males measuring barely 3 mm were playing Romeo to seduce their Juliet by vibrating one of their wings. Besides, it was enough for the lover’s wings to be cut off to deny him any success.
A dialogue of sounds and gestures
Over the years, biologists turned into musicologists and ended up realizing that the serenade actually hid two very different regimes. A pulsing sound, quite simple and largely dominant, emitted in bursts of 2 to 12 units, separated by silence, but also a so-called sinusoidal song, more complex and of a higher frequency. A song that actually hides a conversation, underlines Mala Murthy, director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. “It’s an exchange, with back and forth. He sings, she slows down, turns to him, he sings once more. He constantly takes her behavior into account when deciding what to sing. A real exchange of information. Unlike birds, which trumpet from their perch, it tailors everything it does to its responses. »
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