After reviewing the data, there was insufficient evidence to recommended one method of treatment over the other. This highlights the importance of keeping a national registry in order to compare outcomes between the two methods of treatment.
Members of many species tend to congregate, a behavioral strategy known as local enhancement. Selective advantages of local enhancement range from efficient use of resources to defense from predators. While previous studies have examined many types of social behavior in fruit flies, few have specifically investigated local enhancement. Resource-independent local enhancement has recently been described in the fruit fly using a measure called social space index, although the neural mechanisms remain unknown. Here we analyze resource-independent local enhancement of Drosophila under conditions that allow us to elucidate its neural mechanisms. We have investigated the effects of general volatile anesthetics, compounds that compromise higher order functioning of the type typically required for responding to social cues. We exposed Canton-S flies to non-immobilizing concentrations of halothane and found that flies had a significantly decreased social space index compared to flies tested in air. Narrow abdomen (na) mutants, which display altered responses to anesthetics in numerous behavioral assays, also have a significantly reduced social space index, an effect that was fully reversed by restoring expression of na by driving a UAS-NA rescue construct with NA-GAL4. We found that na expression in cholinergic neurons fully rescued the behavioral defect, whereas expression of na in glutamatergic neurons did so only partially. Our results also suggest a role for na expression in the mushroom bodies, since suppressing na expression in the mushroom bodies of NA-GAL4 rescue flies diminishes social space index. Our data indicate that resource-independent local enhancement, a simple behavioral strategy, requires complex neural processing.
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