To convince female Drosophila melanogaster flies to mate, males sing—that is, they vibrate their wings to serenade females. In more than 50 years of studying these songs, scientists thought there were only two song modes, known as pulse and sine. But in a study published today (July 26) in Current Biology, researchers found that there are actually two different types of pulse songs, lengthening the set list to three and paving the way for a greater understanding of how the brain generates behavior.
“The beauty of the paper is that it demonstrates the hidden complexity in these fruit fly songs,” says David Stern, a biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus who did not participate in the work. “Even what we thought was one song type hides really interesting variation, and this is a beautiful quantitative description of that underlying complexity that most of us missed in ...
