Mapping a post-coital switch in the female fruit fly’s mind

Dramatic changes in the way a female fruit fly behaves after sex have allowed researchers at Oxford University to map the nerve cells responsible.

The fruit fly is an established model for identifying neural elements that direct actions and behaviour. Courtship and reproduction in the fruit fly in particular lend themselves to this.

Yet studies have almost exclusively focused on the male, with the female’s role largely ignored or marginalised to a somewhat passive recipient of the male’s attention.

‘The male fruit fly is a big show off, always trying to impress the female with his elegant courtship display,’ says Stephen Goodwin from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford.

‘During courtship, the female is somewhat “coy” and her behaviours are more enigmatic, so she has tended to be overlooked. But she behaves very differently after mating, and we have exploited this complex behavioural change to explore how chemical signals passed between the sexes can trigger complex behaviours.’

Fruit flies show a range of sophisticated, inter-linked behaviours before sex and afterwards, all of which are focused on producing offspring. But it is after copulating that the female comes into her own, when there is a dramatic shift in her physiology as well as her behaviour.

Stephen Goodwin

It was the neural basis for this shift that Goodwin’s team at the University of Oxford investigated, in collaboration with scientists from the Harvard Medical School and University of Glasgow. Their research is published in the journal Current Biology.