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Automated monitoring and analysis of social behavior in Drosophila

Nature Methods volume 6, pages 297–303 (2009)Cite this article

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Abstract

We introduce a method based on machine vision for automatically measuring aggression and courtship in Drosophila melanogaster. The genetic and neural circuit bases of these innate social behaviors are poorly understood. High-throughput behavioral screening in this genetically tractable model organism is a potentially powerful approach, but it is currently very laborious. Our system monitors interacting pairs of flies and computes their location, orientation and wing posture. These features are used for detecting behaviors exhibited during aggression and courtship. Among these, wing threat, lunging and tussling are specific to aggression; circling, wing extension (courtship 'song') and copulation are specific to courtship; locomotion and chasing are common to both. Ethograms may be constructed automatically from these measurements, saving considerable time and effort. This technology should enable large-scale screens for genes and neural circuits controlling courtship and aggression.

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Figure 1: Imaging setup for genetic screens in Drosophila.
Figure 2: Detection and tracking of fruit flies.
Figure 3: Detectable actions.
Figure 4: Performance of action detection.
Figure 5: Genetic and environmental influences on aggressive and courtship behavior.

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  • 22 March 2009

    NOTE: In the version of this article initially published online, an attribution was omitted. The observation that genetic feminization of cholinergic neurons increases aggression was originally reported in abstract form (Y.B. Chan and E.A. Kravitz, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Neurobiology of Drosophila Abstracts, 42, 2005). The error has been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K. Watanabe and A. Hergarden for helping prepare the flies, assays, taking video footage of flies as well as collecting ground-truth data. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research grant to M.J. Dickinson, D.J.A. and E. Isacoff, a National Science Foundation National Institutes of Health grant to P.P. and M.J. Dickinson, and a postdoctoral fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation to H.D. We thank M. Heisenberg for sponsoring H.D. in Germany and for sharing information and data regarding aggression arenas and automated assays.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA

    Heiko Dankert & Pietro Perona

  2. Division of Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA

    Heiko Dankert, Liming Wang, Eric D Hoopfer & David J Anderson

Authors
  1. Heiko Dankert
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  2. Liming Wang
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  3. Eric D Hoopfer
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  4. David J Anderson
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to David J Anderson or Pietro Perona.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–6, Supplementary Tables 1–9, Supplementary Methods (PDF 3305 kb)

Supplementary Video 1

High-resolution movie clip of a lunge (top view), complementing Figure 3a. (MOV 47 kb)

Supplementary Video 2

Movie clip of body and wing tracking during a lunge. (MOV 251 kb)

Supplementary Video 3

High-resolution movie clip of tussling (top view), complementing Figure 3b. (MOV 141 kb)

Supplementary Video 4

High-resolution movie clip of a wing threat (side view), complementing Figure 3c. (MOV 86 kb)

Supplementary Video 5

Movie clip of body and wing tracking during a wing threat. (MOV 564 kb)

Supplementary Video 6

High-resolution movie clip of wing extension and circling (top view), complementing Figure 3e. (MOV 185 kb)

Supplementary Video 7

Movie clip of body and wing tracking during wing extension and circling. (MOV 2009 kb)

Supplementary Video 8

High-resolution movie clip of copulation (side view), complementing Figure 3d. (MOV 762 kb)

Supplementary Video 9

High-resolution movie clip of copulation with wing extension and circling (top view), complementing Figure 3d. (MOV 259 kb)

Supplementary Video 10

High-resolution movie clip of chasing (top view), complementing Figure 3f. (MOV 742 kb)

Supplementary Software

Source code of “Caltech Automated Drosophila Aggression-Courtship Behavioral Repertoire Analysis (CADABRA)”. (ZIP 3904 kb)

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Dankert, H., Wang, L., Hoopfer, E. et al. Automated monitoring and analysis of social behavior in Drosophila. Nat Methods 6, 297–303 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1310

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