More #PintSizedScience
Insects have complex lives & face many of the same challenges we do. Landing a mate, getting along with family, living in an uncertain world..

Recently @eleanorbath & Jess Thomson & I looked at anxiety in fruit flies

@pintofscience @biouea #Pint20
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Anxiety?? In flies??? Sounds weird but flies are a really useful model for anxiety. We share most of our basic physiology & ~60% of our genes with flies. And flies show similar anxious behaviours to other animals (incl us): they stick to the perimeter when they’re stressed.

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We wanted to know if anxiety is influenced by mating. Anxiety helps individuals identify risks, & mating might change how risky the environment is.
And mating affects all kinds of behaviours in female insects – aggression, napping, feeding, you name it.

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..So we wondered if mating would affect anxiety differently in males and females.
In a nutshell: it didn’t (anti-climactic, I know). No evidence that mating affects anxious behaviour (sticking to the side of an arena). And no evidence for sex differences in anxiety.

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We conclude that anxiety isn’t one of the many behaviours affected by mating in fruit flies.

In humans, anxiety is diagnosed 2X as often in women than men. So, we need a different model organism to learn about the underlying genetics of sex differences in anxiety.

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Oh yes and here is the link to the open-access paper in Animal Behaviour:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347220301391
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Whoops that should be @EleanorBath1 for tweets about flies and aggression