Summary
2011 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and Its Applications
2011
Session Number:B0L-H
Session:
Number:B0L-H1
At the level of language, Drosophila’s sex life is as rich as ours
Ruedi Stoop, Patrick Nuesch, Ralph Lukas Stoop, Leonid Bunimovich,
pp.310-313
Publication Date:2011/9/4
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
Precopulatory courtship is a high-cost nonwell understood mystery in animal world. Drosophila’s (=D.’s) courtship shows marked structural similarities with its mammalian counterpart, suggesting its study to dissect origins, purpose and modalities of the phenomenon. From courtship videos, using a mathematical symbolic dynamics approach, we show that D.’s body language allows to express in addition to a coarse-grained population group membership also finer, individual information. From a formal language point of view, D.’s body language is shown to have a complexity of language that is equal or even exceeds that of human language.