Inferring the role of internal dynamics in Drosophila aging

The process of aging affects multiple aspects of animal behavior, from behavioral outputs to the physiological mechanisms that control them. It remains unclear, however, the extent to which this is a result of the gradual failure of individual components or the explicit execution of physiological alterations in gene expression and neural circuitry. In this talk, we investigate this distinction by analyzing behavioral data of aging male and female fruit flies (D. melanogaster). We measure the full behavioral repertoire of male and female flies as a function of age, long time-scale dynamics in behavioral transitions, and coarse-grained hierarchical structures that underlie these dynamics. These coarse-grained structures provide information about predictability as a function of age, the structure of the behavioral dynamics, and how these behaviors are affected by the aging process. We find that a sexual dimorphism emerges, suggesting that female flies’ aging dynamics can largely be explained through a gradual loss of function whereas male flies’ behavior is most likely a combination of senescence and slowly-varying internal states. These results are in agreement with previous results and suggest future experiments to explain the underlying mechanisms of behavioral change with age.