BNMC Seminar - The Visual Ethology of Fruit Flies

Michael Dickinson
Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering
Caltech

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, suffers a rather poor reputation as a pesky lab rat, better known for its rapid breeding chromosome number than for its behavioral repertoire. The research in my laboratory focuses on the sensory ethology of fruit flies, treating these tiny insects not simply as convenient laboratory models, but as real animals that have evolved a successful life history pattern. The goal of this work is to try to deconstruct the animal’s behavior into a sequence of sensory-motor modules. Although these insects make use of many sensory modalities as they explore their environment, vision plays an essential role in nearly all aspects of their life history. My talk will focus on several visually-mediated components of behavior including take-off, navigation, predator avoidance, landing, and local exploration, as well as components of social behavior than ensue whenever two or more flies alight on the same piece of rotting fruit.