title: Coping with Space Neophobia in Drosophila melanogaster: The Asymmetric Dynamics of Crossing a Doorway to the Untrodden.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.|Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Shay
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cohen
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and OR, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.|Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Yoav
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Benjamini
authors.affiliation: Department of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.|Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Ilan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Golani
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000818:Animals; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology*