@albertcardona Oh interesting!!! This is one of the questions I have about flies, can they visually recognize each other. There was a visual connectome modeling paper a while back showing that it was theoretically possible, and I wonder about the role of individual recognition in general in fly social behavior.
Mapping the #Drosophila connectome made us all realize that the humble fly can do a lot more than we had been giving it credit for. Wouldn't surprise me if fruit flies can recognize each other. Many other insect species surely can recognize conspecifics.
@albertcardona Yeah, I think it's possible, particularly in combination with chemosensory cues, but unclear, as with the jumping spiders, whether/when/how it is useful. Thanks for the link!!
@kristinmbranson@albertcardona One the experiments we included in our fly-handling robot paper had a bit of evidence consistent with vision-dependent behavioral social networks. I think they can do some version of individual visual recognition.
@debivort@albertcardona Thanks!! Very interesting!! Do you have an intuition as to whether the flies might be using the physical appearance of the other fly vs other visually available properties, e.g. the movements of the other fly? Have you thought about doing a "playback" experiment, where on day n > 1 you project a (possibly modified) video of the second fly on the barrier? I'm thinking it could be an interesting way to separate out visual appearance vs movement/closed-loop interaction.
Barry Condron did a playback video experiment with #Drosophila melanogaster larvae and claims that larvae can detect other larvae by visual input alone:
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