title: Death Valley, Drosophila, and the Devonian toolkit.
abstract: Most experiments on the flight behavior of Drosophila melanogaster have been performed within confined laboratory chambers, yet the natural history of these animals involves dispersal that takes place on a much larger spatial scale. Thirty years ago, a group of population geneticists performed a series of mark-and-recapture experiments on Drosophila flies, which demonstrated that even cosmopolitan species are capable of covering 10 km of open desert, probably in just a few hours and without the possibility of feeding along the way. In this review I revisit these fascinating and informative experiments and attempt to explain how-from takeoff to landing-the flies might have made these journeys based on our current knowledge of flight behavior. This exercise provides insight into how animals generate long behavioral sequences using sensory-motor modules that may have an ancient evolutionary origin.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195; email: flyman@uw.edu.
authors.forename: Michael H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Dickinson
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003889:Desert Climate; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D005426:Flight, Animal; D009949:Orientation; D012903:Smell; D014796:Visual Perception