Drosophila males integrate song and pheromones usingcontext-specific strategies

Abstract

Animals need to integrate sensory information from multiple modalities to interact with their environment and with others. In male Drosophila, multiple sensory cues modulate social behaviors such as courtship and aggression, but the strategies by which multimodal cues are combined to inform social behavior are not known. Here, we focus on how courtship song and taste cues are integrated to shape the social behavior of male flies. By combining cue manipulations with computational modeling, we assessed the individual and combined contributions of song and taste. Our results reveal three context-specific integration strategies. Overall social interactions were driven by a linear combination of song and taste. Aggression was driven by song, independent of taste cues. Courtship was controlled by a nonlinear integration of song and female taste cues, with female taste flipping the valence of song from suppressing to enhancing courtship. Our results show how context-specific integration strategies allow animals to recognize social scenarios and produce flexible, context-appropriate behaviors.