And now, for something completely different:

> Starve a fruitfly for a couple of hours, and it gets a little cranky. Pop it into a fruit-fly-sized ring, add seven other starving flies and just one piece of food, and you'll have a riot. "They stand up on their little hind legs and tussle," says geneticist Trudy Mackay at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "And then there's the wing slap," adds her collaborator, Robert Anholt.

> Researchers in Mackay's lab quantify aggressive behaviour by counting how often each fruitfly wrestles, slaps, or chases its competitors. They have uncovered a wide range of responses, even among members of the same species. One fly had 100 aggressive inter-actions in two minutes; others had as few as three. "Those are the pacifists," says Mackay. "They sit there and share the food."

> "I'm after as much sequence as I can get, in a very greedy way," says Stephen Richards of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who is an investigator on the drosophila project. Richards says that similar projects in other insects, such as mosquitoes or honeybees, could be on the horizon.

Published online 25 June 2008 | Nature  453, 1154-1155 (2008) |
doi:10.1038/4531154a

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