Singing flies and DIY
The musical chirping of crickets will be a familiar sound to readers, but many other insects have their own songs too. In the laboratory stalwart Drosophila fruit fly, males “sing” to females during courtship by vibrating their wings to produce different sinusoidal patterns that may not seem very melodic to you or me, but – if appropriately tuned – are irresistible to female Drosophila. These songs have become something of a model for studies of both neural and genetic control of behaviour, largely because there are regular rhythms that can be (fairly) easily quantified – usually through manual annotation.
Benjamin Arthur and colleagues, in a paper just published …
