Summary of the research project:

There is a long history of scholars examining play through an evolutionary lens, beginning with Darwin (1859) and extending to modern times ( Bateson, 2005, Pellegrini, 2011; Pellegrini & Bjorklund, 2004; Pellegrini, Dupuis, & Smith, 2007; Power, 2000).

However, Today play is rarely mentioned in conjunction with invertebrates, be they barnacles, earthworms, spiders, bees or flies. (Aldis, 1975; Bekoff & Byers, 1981, 1998; Fagen, 1981) .

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a versatile model organism that has been used in biomedical research for over a century to study a broad range of phenomena.

The general principles of gene transmission, linkage, sex determination, genetic interactions; molecular, biochemical and developmental genetics, chromosomal aberrations, penetrance and expressivity, and evolutionary change may all be admirably demonstrated by using the fruit fly.

During the works of my supervisor Dr Durrieu on object learning in drosophila, he observed that the flies would often roll balls for no apparent benefit. The question of play then arises, do drosophilae have the potential to show a play-like behavior that is ‘pleasurable’?

At the Neuroengineering Laboratory (Ramdya Lab), my goal will be to develop an experiment to shed light on drosophila’s object play and recognizing the motor patterns involved in such behavior.

Therefore, I will be designing a behavioral study where I can record flies using tracking tools and determine whether they play or not.

I am tremendously interested in the research work conducted in the Ramdya Lab that allows a deeper understanding not only of biological intelligence but also reverse-engineering of drosophila, with a seemingly small nervous system capable of generating very complex behaviors.

Object play in drosophila melanogaster has not been studied before, my work in the Ramdya Lab could allow further exploration to dive into the benefits of animal play in invertebrates.

A deeper understanding of the subject would allow us to design and develop AI and micro-robots capable of developing novel behaviors through environmental experimentation, specifically play, as an aspect of behavioral ontogeny in which partially or totally mastered responses are varied and combined into new sequences.

Description of the work that will be specifically undertaken in the project:

My project can be divided into:

1.  Learning the basis of animal play and behavioral patterns of drosophila melanogaster.
2.  Designing and prototyping of the experimental setup and maintaining fly husbandry.
3.  Recording the experiments and analyzing the data.
4.  Producing a description of the experiments as well as a statistical analysis.

Expected planned research impact:

This work should help establish the grounds for more research on the ways in which play behavior might benefit early brain development.

Playful recombination of motor patterns and responses into new sequences could, like rearrangements of genetic material, tend to increase the phenotypic variability of an animal’s offspring (Fedigan ;1972,Feitelson and Ross ;1973).

Spread and elaboration of a novel behavior that may have originated in play is described by many scientists ( Menzel ;1972, Gwinner ;1966 ).These “invented” patterns were later observed in goal-directed activity.

Thus, the study of animal play may show the contribution of play as behavioral variation to evolution in invertebrates.

Dr Fagen is an eminent researcher in the animal play domain, his early writings (1974,1981), created in the early, heady days of sociobiology under the influence of Dr Wilson (1975), epitomized this view: ‘‘Analysis of play using hypothetico-deductive evolutionary theory may offend ethologists and comparative psychologists who prefer data to mathematical models and physiological metaphors to evolutionary logic’’ (Fagen, 1981: 480). However, there was just not enough knowledge about the details of play to generate any predictions that were both novel and general.

As we gain more information on the actual rates, costs, and behavioral details of play, mathematical modeling of play might have a revival.

References:

Deepa Parvathi Va, Akshaya Amritha Sa, Solomon FD Paul, animal model for genetic studies- Drosophila Melanogaster –Its life cycle and breeding methods – a review (2009), available at: https://www.sriramachandra.edu.in/university/pdf/research/journals/jun_2009.pdf#page=37

Gordon M.Burghardt, The genesis of animal play: Testing the limits, available at: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3229.001.0001

Alan B.Bond University of Nebraska,George W. Barlow,University of California, Berkeley, William Rogers University of California, Berkeley.Two Modal Action Patterns with a Continuous Temporal Distribution, available at :https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/17236358.pdf

Bekoff, M. (1978) Social play: Structure, function, and the evolution of a cooperative social behavior. In: The development of behavior: Comparative and evolutionary aspects, ed. Burghardt, G. M. & Bekoff, M., pp. 367–83. New York: Garland Press. [CMB, PKS]Google ScholarOpenURL query

Fagen, R. M. (1974) Selective and evolutionary aspects of animal play. American Naturalist 108:850–58. [PKS]CrossRefGoogle ScholarOpenURL query

Fagen, R. M. (1976b) Modeling how and why play works. In: Play – Its role in development and evolution, ed. Bruner, J. S., Jolly, A. & Sylva, K., pp. 96–115. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. [PKS]Google ScholarOpenURL query

Smith, P. (1982). Does play matter? Functional and evolutionary aspects of animal and human play. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(1), 139-155. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0001092X

Barbara H. Jennings,Drosophila – a versatile model in biology & medicine, Materials Today, Volume 14, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 190-195, ISSN 1369-7021,https://doi.org/10.1016/S1369-7021(11)70113-4.(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369702111701134)

Hiruni Samadi Galpayage Dona, Cwyn Solvi, Amelia Kowalewska,Kaarle Makela, HaDi MaBouDi, and Lars Chittka. Do bumble bees play? (2020) available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.08.013