Care socie, cari soci,
sul nostro stendardo una drosofila cerca una compagna, ma non siamo contrari/e all’eterosessualità e apprezzeremo tutti la splendida ricerca pubblica oggi su Nature. Philip Coen et al. descrivono il canto del drosofilo quando la passeggiata sulla pesca con l’amata moscerina si fa più intima in “Dynamic sensory cues shape song structure in Drosophila“. Il lirismo che manca al paper si trova (avvertenza: testo esplicito) in “Ordered randomness in fly love songs“, il commento di Bence Ölveczky:
One thing that we know these neural circuits do is transform their male owners into mini Casanovas. On encountering a receptive virgin female, a male fly will gently tap her rear end, serenade her with a ‘song’ by vibrating one of his wings, and lick her genitalia. Although these behaviours are part of any self-respecting fly’s lovemaking repertoire, the duration and ordering of the different courtship elements can be highly unpredictable. What gives rise to such seemingly random behaviour? Is the variability due to stochastic fluctuations in the underlying neural networks (neural noise), or the result of a dynamic sensory experience?
Ölveczky ritiene più probabile la seconda ipotesi:
But whether song patterning matters to females or not, we now know that its variability, and probably the variability of many other ‘fixed’ behaviours, is not simply the consequence of noise in nervous-system function. Rather, a sizeable fraction of that variability is likely to reflect computations performed by reliable and predictable brains on an ever-changing sensory environment.
Grassetto della presidente che resta in attesa di un paper sul gradimento del song patterning da parte dell’amata e alla prossima assemblea intende proporre la candidatura di Bence Ölveczky a socio honoris causa.