MOITA Marta

SAFETY IN NUMBERS: BEHAVIORAL AND NEURONAL BASIS OF SOCIAL REGULATION OF DEFENSIVE BEHAVIORS

MOITA Marta
Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown

ABSTRACT

Our lab is interested in the general problem of adaptive behavior in response to threats, and of the neural mechanisms underlying a choice between strategies. Protection against predatory threat is a driving force for sociality: living in groups enables improved predator detection and coordinated defensive behaviors. It is also advantageous by dilution, through a decrease in the probability that each individual becomes the sacrificial victim. Because living in a group allows individuals to decrease their defenses, it also enables other globally beneficial behaviors such as foraging. These selective forces on the evolution of social behavior have been demonstrated in a wide range of animals ranging from invertebrates to mammals. While it is well known that predators use motion cues produced by moving prey for their detection, less is known about the ability of prey to use these motion cues to detect impending danger. I will present two studies, one in rats and another one in fruit flies, which together show that animals of very distant taxa use the same social cue to infer the presence of danger, albeit relying on different sensory modalities. Both rats and flies use the cessation of movement of others as a cue of danger, and the resumption of movement as a cue of safety. One study describes the neuronal circuit rats use to detect freezing in others relying on audition, and the other how flies use visual motion cues generated by their neighbors to guide their response to threat. These studies provide first, a mechanistic understanding of a key conserved behavior present in both fruit flies and rats and second, a potential entry point into the study of the evolution of social behavior.

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