A Novel Method for Tracking Individuals of Fruit Fly Swarms Flying in a Laboratory Flight Arena

PLoS One. 2015 Jun 17;10(6):e0129657. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0129657. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The growing interest in studying social behaviours of swarming fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, has heightened the need for developing tools that provide quantitative motion data. To achieve such a goal, multi-camera three-dimensional tracking technology is the key experimental gateway. We have developed a novel tracking system for tracking hundreds of fruit flies flying in a confined cubic flight arena. In addition to the proposed tracking algorithm, this work offers additional contributions in three aspects: body detection, orientation estimation, and data validation. To demonstrate the opportunities that the proposed system offers for generating high-throughput quantitative motion data, we conducted experiments on five experimental configurations. We also performed quantitative analysis on the kinematics and the spatial structure and the motion patterns of fruit fly swarms. We found that there exists an asymptotic distance between fruit flies in swarms as the population density increases. Further, we discovered the evidence for repulsive response when the distance between fruit flies approached the asymptotic distance. Overall, the proposed tracking system presents a powerful method for studying flight behaviours of fruit flies in a three-dimensional environment.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acceleration
  • Animals
  • Drosophila melanogaster / physiology*
  • Flight, Animal*
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional / methods*
  • Laboratories*
  • Likelihood Functions
  • Movement
  • Orientation
  • Social Behavior*
  • Wings, Animal / physiology

Grants and funding

The research work presented in this paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 61175036 awarded to YQC) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant no. XDB02040100 awarded to AG). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.