Taketoshi Kiya, Takekazu Kunieda, and Takeo Kubo. Dept. Biological Sciences, Grad. Sch. Science, The Univ. Tokyo, 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyou-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan
Social animals have highly developed communicative abilities. Honeybees, Apis mellifera L, organize a sophisticated society and the workers transmit information on the location of food sources to the nest mates using a symbolic dance, known as ‘dance language’. In spite of the simple structure of the honeybee brain and the stereotypic dance behavior, the neural mechanisms that underlie dance communication are unknown. To identify brain regions involved in dance communication, we explored active brain regions using an immediate early gene as a marker of neural activity. Here we used the differential display method to identify a novel immediately early gene, termed kakusei, which is expressed in the worker brains by seizure induced by awakening from anesthesia. Kakusei was induced in the optic lobe neurons in response to the visual stimuli by light exposure, indicating that kakusei can be used as a marker of physiological neural activity. In the dancing worker (dancer) brains, kakusei was prominently expressed in the small-type Kenyon cells (sKCs) of the mushroom bodies. In contrast, no significant kakusei expression was observed in the brains of the nurse bees or workers that follow the dancers. Interestingly, Kakusei was also expressed similarly in the forager brains and its expression levels in the sKCs significantly differed between the waggle and round dancers, which indicate different distances, suggesting that sKC neural activity is associated with differences in foraging behavior. These results suggest that sKCs might be important for information processing during foraging behavior, which is essential for dance communication. We expect that our study provides a starting point for understanding the neural mechanisms of dance communication, which have been a mystery since its discovery by Prof. Karl von Frisch.
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