As someone that has worked on fly behavior for many years, I’ve become more and more fascinated with the beginnings of the field. It...

This is probably one of my most controversial opinions, but I think that the mood of a person can affect the outcome of an experiment. To...

My lab performs lots of memory experiments: both Classical (Pavlovian) Conditioning experiments where a cue is presented at the same time...

As with all behavioral neuroscience animal model experiments, food deprivation is used as a way to increase motivational response. This...

Clearly "Should I use male or female flies for behavior?" is a trick question because there really is nothing limiting you from testing...

It’s important to clean fly behavior equipment because flies leave feces and cuticular hydrocarbons on the behavior arena surface, and...

When you first learn experimental design, you learn all the best ways to control your experiments and prevent bias from infiltrating your...

More and more the behavioral neuroscience field is moving toward using highly efficient and high-content behavioral tracking software to...

When I first started working on flies, I had no knowledge of genetics or insects. My limited undergraduate research experience included a...

Optogenetics is a great way to temporarily control neuronal function. It’s typically used for light-controlled activation or inhibition...

Flies can sense humidity in their environment, and change their behavior when the air is too wet or dry (more on this on ‘Does humidity...

When you perform fly behavior experiments, you don’t want to use recently anesthetized flies since the common anesthesia that we use...

The size of your flies could affect their behavior, but it may depend on the type of behavior you are measuring. Fly size can be directly...

Drosophila have one of the best characterized olfactory systems of any animal (for a great overview, read Benton, 2022). Flies use...

In order to get the most accurate behavior tracking, we create environments that are very artificial to flies. We also need to get very...

One of the nice things about working with flies is that you can build a simple, cost-efficient tracking system pretty easily. In the lab...

Flies demonstrate negative geotaxis, an innate escape response during which flies ascend the walls of whatever chamber they are in. In...

Flies have more complex social lives than have really been appreciated by a lot of the field of fly behavioral neurogenetics. I wrote a...

My PhD advisor, Dr. Marla Sokolowski, at the University of Toronto always told us that she felt Drosophila adult or larval behavior was...

As you probably know, carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most popular anesthesia for fly pushing. It immobilizes flies quickly and flies wake up...