Assessing Experience-dependent Tuning of Song Preference in Fruit Flies (Drosophila melanogaster)

In songbirds and higher mammals, early auditory experience during childhood is critical to detect and discriminate sound patterns in adulthood. However, the neural and molecular nature of this acquired ability remains elusive. Here, we describe a new behavioral paradigm with Drosophila melanogaster to investigate how the auditory experience shapes sound perception. This behavioral paradigm consists of two parts: training session and test session. In the training session, we keep the flies singly in a training capsule and expose them to training sound for 6 days after eclosion. After the training session, flies are subjected to the test session, in which the mating behaviors of flies are monitored upon sound playback. As the training and test sounds, we use two types of artificial sound, which correspond to the pattern of conspecific and heterospecific courtship songs of fruit flies. By applying this method, we can measure how the acoustic experience with the conspecific song as a young adult sharpens the song preference and mate selection as a breeding adult in the fruit fly.