Conservation of the behavioral and transcriptional response to social experience among Drosophilids.

While social experience has been shown to significantly alter behaviors in a wide range of species, comparative studies that uniformly measure the impact of a single experience across multiple species have been lacking, limiting our understanding of how plastic traits evolve. To address this, we quantified variations in social feeding behaviors across 10 species of Drosophilids, tested the effect of altering rearing context on these behaviors (reared in groups or in isolation) and correlated observed behavioral shifts to accompanying transcriptional changes in the heads of these flies. We observed significant variability in the extent of aggressiveness, the utilization of social cues during food search, and social space preferences across species. The sensitivity of these behaviors to rearing experience also varied: socially naive flies were more aggressive than their socialized conspecifics in some species, and more reserved or identical in others. Despite these differences, the mechanism of socialization appeared to be conserved within the melanogaster subgroup as species could cross‐socialize each other, and the transcriptional response to social exposure was significantly conserved. The expression levels of chemosensory‐perception genes often varied between species and rearing conditions, supporting a growing body of evidence that behavioral evolution is driven by the differential regulation of this class of genes. The clear differences in behavioral responses to socialization observed in Drosophilids make this an ideal system for continued studies on the genetic basis and evolution of socialization and behavioral plasticity. The impact of socialization on aggression and social space requirements varies between closely related Drosophild species, while the mechanism of socialization is conserved (species can cross‐socialized each other).

虽然社会经验已被证明能显著改变众多物种的行为，但缺乏对单一经验在多个物种中的影响进行统一测量的比较研究，这限制了我们对可塑性状如何进化的理解。为了解决这个问题，我们对10种果蝇的社会进食行为的变化进行了量化，测试了改变饲养环境（群居饲养或单独饲养）对这些行为的影响，并将观察到的行为变化与这些果蝇头部伴随的转录变化相关联。我们观察到不同物种在攻击性程度、觅食过程中对社会线索的利用以及社会空间偏好方面存在显著差异。这些行为对饲养经验的敏感性也各不相同：在某些物种中，未经社交的果蝇比经过社交的同种果蝇更具攻击性，而在其他物种中则更内敛或相同。尽管存在这些差异，但社会化的机制在黑腹果蝇亚群内似乎是保守的，因为不同物种可以相互进行社会化，并且对社会接触的转录反应也显著保守。化学感觉感知基因的表达水平在不同物种和饲养条件之间常常存在差异，这支持了越来越多的证据，即行为进化是由这类基因的差异调节所驱动的。果蝇在对社会化的行为反应上存在明显差异，这使其成为继续研究社会化和行为可塑性的遗传基础及进化的理想系统。 社会化对攻击性和社会空间需求的影响在近缘的果蝇物种之间存在差异，而社会化的机制是保守的（物种可以相互进行社会化）。