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Social Environment Influences Interaction Dynamics and Group Structure in Drosophila melanogaster

Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Drosophila melanogaster engage in a variety of social behaviours and interactions including complex courtship and mating rituals, aggregation in both lab and wild environments, and aggressive fights. Using social network analysis, I explore the effects of group composition and group size on individuals’ behaviours and group network cohesion. I first show that a strain of hyperaggressive flies differs from wildtype flies in both their individual behaviors and group level network properties. When combined in different ratios, mixed groups behave differently than either all hyperaggressive or all wildtype groups, and the shift in their individual and network properties is towards and past the hyperaggressive flies regardless of the ratio. Remarkably, a single hyperaggressive fly in a group of wildtype flies is enough to define the entire groups’ structure. In my second data chapter I show that flies are capable of discerning group size changes of a single individual. As group size increases, interaction rate and Betweenness Centrality, a network parameter that captures the importance of individuals for information flow, both increase. Disrupting different sensory modalities of flies does not eliminate their ability to discern group size; however, subtle changes in variation and in trends across all group sizes suggest that vision, olfaction, hearing, and mechanosensation are all at least partially involved sensing social group size. Analyses of Coefficients of Variation suggest that flies use the Approximate Number System to assess the size of their social groups, and that there is something biologically important about group sizes 9 and 10. The size and composition of flies’ social environments affects both individual behaviours and group level phenotypes.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7132880454
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