Welcome!
To use the personalized features of this site, please log in or register.
If you have forgotten your username or password, we can help.
My Menu
Saved Items

Copulatory Courtship in Drosophila: Behavior and Songs of D. birchii and D. serrata

Anneli Hoikkala1 and Stella Crossley2

(1) Department of Biology, University of Oulu, Finland
(2) Department of Psychology, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

Abstract   D. birchii and D. serrata, two endemic Australian Drosophila species, have a copulatory courtship. The males of these species begin to court the female after mounting her and often go on with the courtship after the copulation is over. In the present paper we have described behavioral interactions between the male and the female and analyzed acoustic signals produced by the flies during courtship. Species differences were more pronounced in female than in male behavior. Variation within the species was obvious in the relative proportions of time the flies spent in different behaviors. Even though courtship took place nearly solely during copulation, some remains of precopulatory courtship were observed in both species. It is suggested that copulatory courtship exhibited by D. birchii and D. serrata flies is a derived rather than a primitive character.

copulatory courtship - behavioral interactions - songs - evolution


Fulltext Preview (Small, Large)
Image of the first page of the fulltext


Export this article
Export this article as RIS | Text
 
Remote Address: 38.107.191.117 • Server: mpweb07
HTTP User Agent: CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)