Mating imperatives drive plasticity of the daily temporal niche in fruit flies.
- 1iEES-Paris, INRAE
Abstract
Animals confine their daily activity to distinct diurnal, crepuscular, or nocturnal windows. It remains unclear how hundreds of sympatric species sharing the same temporal niche manage to coexist. To address this, we monitored the daily activity of the twilight-active, species-rich Drosophila genus under naturalistic conditions. Here, we show that intense sociosexual interactions rapidly drive a species-specific reformatting of their canonical crepuscular niche. The dominant sensory modality used for sexual communication predicts niche shift direction: reliance on chemosensation for courtship redirects behavioral activity into the night, while visual reliance shifts it into the day. This temporal plasticity bypasses the circadian clock, instead operating via a conserved dopaminergic pathway that simultaneously inhibits sleep and sustains sexual motivation. Our results reveal how mating imperatives enable conditional colonization of otherwise restricted temporal windows. Ultimately, by driving the divergence of previously overlapping niches, sociosexually induced temporal plasticity provides a powerful mechanism for sympatric coexistence in crowded environments.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{ghosh2026mating,
title = {{Mating imperatives drive plasticity of the daily temporal niche in fruit flies.}},
author = {S. Ghosh and P. Zhong and C. Suray and J. Mir and T. Chen and A. Palazzo and V. Rincheval and F. Rouyer and A. Chatterjee},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.64898/2026.07.02.736183},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.02.736183v2},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Mating imperatives drive plasticity of the daily temporal niche in fruit flies.
AU - S. Ghosh
AU - P. Zhong
AU - C. Suray
AU - J. Mir
AU - T. Chen
AU - A. Palazzo
AU - V. Rincheval
AU - F. Rouyer
AU - A. Chatterjee
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/02
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.07.02.736183
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.02.736183v2
AB - Animals confine their daily activity to distinct diurnal, crepuscular, or nocturnal windows. It remains unclear how hundreds of sympatric species sharing the same temporal niche manage to coexist. To address this, we monitored the daily activity of the twilight-active, species-rich Drosophila genus under naturalistic conditions. Here, we show that intense sociosexual interactions rapidly drive a species-specific reformatting of their canonical crepuscular niche. The dominant sensory modality used for sexual communication predicts niche shift direction: reliance on chemosensation for courtship redirects behavioral activity into the night, while visual reliance shifts it into the day. This temporal plasticity bypasses the circadian clock, instead operating via a conserved dopaminergic pathway that simultaneously inhibits sleep and sustains sexual motivation. Our results reveal how mating imperatives enable conditional colonization of otherwise restricted temporal windows. Ultimately, by driving the divergence of previously overlapping niches, sociosexually induced temporal plasticity provides a powerful mechanism for sympatric coexistence in crowded environments.
ER -