QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s):
Home     Help     Feedback     Subscriptions     Archive     Search     Table of Contents

First published online October 2, 2009
Journal of Experimental Biology 212, 3377-3386 (2009)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2009
doi: 10.1242/jeb.025221

This Article Figures Only Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Hesselberg, T. Articles by Lehmann, F.-O. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Hesselberg, T. Articles by Lehmann, F.-O. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

The role of experience in flight behaviour of Drosophila

Thomas Hesselberg and Fritz-Olaf Lehmann^*

Biofuture Research Group, Institute of Neurobiology, University of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 11, 89081 Ulm, Germany

^* Author for correspondence (fritz.lehmann{at}uni-ulm.de)

Accepted 21 July 2009

Experience plays a key role in the acquisition of complex motor skills in running and flight of many vertebrates. To evaluate the significance of previous experience for the efficiency of motor behaviour in an insect, we investigated the flight behaviour of the fruit fly Drosophila. We reared flies in chambers in which the animals could freely walk and extend their wings, but could not gain any flight experience. These naive animals were compared with control flies under both open- and closed-loop tethered flight conditions in a flight simulator as well as in a free-flight arena. The data suggest that the overall flight behaviour in Drosophila seems to be predetermined because both groups exhibited similar mean stroke amplitude and stroke frequency, similar open-loop responses to visual stimulation and the immediate ability to track visual objects under closed-loop feedback conditions. In short free flight bouts, peak saccadic turning rate, angular acceleration, peak horizontal speed and flight altitude were also similar in naive and control flies. However, we found significant changes in other key parameters in naive animals such as a reduction in mean horizontal speed (–23%) and subtle changes in mean turning rate (–48%). Naive flies produced 25% less yaw torque-equivalent stroke amplitudes than the controls in response to a visual stripe rotating in open loop around the tethered animal, potentially suggesting a flight-dependent adaptation of the visuo-motor gain in the control group. This change ceased after the animals experienced visual closed-loop feedback. During closed-loop flight conditions, naive flies had 53% larger differences in left and right stroke amplitude when fixating a visual object, thus steering control was less precise. We discuss two alternative hypotheses to explain our results: the `neuronal experience' hypothesis, suggesting that there are some elements of learning and fine-tuning involved during the first flight experiences in Drosophila and the `muscular exercise' hypothesis. Our experiments support the first hypothesis because maximum locomotor capacity seems not to be significantly impaired in the naive group. Although this study primarily confirms the genetic pre-disposition for flight in Drosophila, previous experience may apparently adjust locomotor fine control and aerial performance, although this effect seems to be small compared with vertebrates.

Key words: motor learning, locomotor plasticity, flight experience, free-flight performance, saccades, wing kinematics, force production, fruit fly

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?