Individual differences in sensory responses influence decision making by Drosophila melanogaster larvae on exposure to contradictory cues

Abstract

Animals make decisions on behavioral choice by evaluating internal and external signals. Individuals often make decisions in different ways, but the underlying neural mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we describe a system for observing the behavior of individual Drosophila melanogaster larvae simultaneously presented with contradictory signals, in this case attractive (yeast paste) and aversive (NaCl) signals. Olfaction was used to detect the yeast paste, whereas the ENaC/Pickpocket channel was important for NaCl detection. We found that wild-type (Canton-S) larvae fall into two decision making groups: one group decided to approach the yeast paste by overcoming the aversive signal, whereas the other group decided to forgo the yeast paste because of the aversive signal. Our findings indicate that different endogenous sensitivities to NaCl contribute to make differences between two groups and that diverse decision making steps occur in individual animals.

Keywords:

• Attractive
• aversive
• contradictory cues
• decision making

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr L. Vosshall, Dr T. Uemura, Dr A. Nose and Dr H. Kohsaka for providing flies, H. Yanaka for technical support, Y. Harigai and Y. Koide for performing preliminary experiments, and the members of the Miyakawa Laboratory for their valuable comments. We also thank the National Institute of Genetics, the Drosophila Genetic Resource Center and the Bloomington stock center for flies.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Funding information

This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan [grant number 21500310] to T.M.