S-053 | Under predation Drosophila stores an associative long-term memory

Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Valentino Morazzo Nunzi | Email: valentinovittoriomn@gmail.com

Valentino Morazzo Nunzi^1°, Christian Carpio Romero^3°, Lia Frenkel^3°,  Freudenthal Ramiro^1°

^1° Laboratorio de Plasticidad Sináptica y Memoria, Instituto de Biociencias, Biotecnología y Biología traslacional (IB3), UBA-CONICET, FCEN, UBA, CABA, Argentina.
^2° Laboratorio de Genética del Comportamiento, Fundación Instituto Leloir, IIBBA-CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
^3° Laboratorio de neurociencias del tiempo, Instituto de Biociencias, Biotecnología y Biología traslacional (IB3), UBA-CONICET, FCEN, UBA, CABA, Argentina

Evolutionarily, predation has exerted selection pressure on the behaviors of species. Strategies that are effective and confer survival, will persist over time. Predatory risk can affect the behavior and physiology of the prey, and in this way, it has been proposed that natural selection guided the development of different behavioral systems, among them a rapid learning and memory system (Pavlovian conditioning) that allows to identify threats and promote pertinent defensive behaviors.
Drosophila melanogaster under predation express a variety of defensive behaviors therefore predation has been proposed to promote learning; thus, it is valuable to utilize a natural predator as a source of unconditioned stimulus to study behavior responses, in comparison to more reductionistic ones such as electric shocks. Here we study the interaction with the spider Menemerus semilimbatus, a Salticid specialized predator of Diptera. It is of our interest to study long-term memories so we developed a paradigm in which we faced flies with a predator within a specific context during a training session and 24 hours later, during testing we evaluated long-term memory retention, defined as a significantly lower movement in trained than control animals. We found that this memory retention is context-specific which suggests that this type of memory is associative.
This long-term memory model will allow us to study molecular pathways involved in a naturalistic learning and memory model.