Behavioral and neuronal underpinnings of safety in numbers in fruit flies

Living in a group allows individuals to decrease their defenses, enabling other beneficial behaviors such as foraging. The detection of a threat through social cues is widely reported, however, the safety cues that guide animals to break away from a defensive behavior and resume alternate activities remain elusive. Here we show that fruit flies display a graded decrease in freezing behavior, triggered by an inescapable threat, with increasing group sizes. Furthermore, flies use the cessation of movement of other flies as a cue of threat and its resumption as a cue of safety. Finally, we find that lobula columnar neurons, LC11, mediate the propensity for freezing flies to resume moving in response to the movement of others. By identifying visual motion cues, and the neurons involved in their processing, as the basis of a social safety cue this study brings new insights into the neuronal basis of safety in numbers. Living in groups allows animals to decrease defenses, enabling other behaviors, but the mechanisms of safety in numbers are unknown. The authors show that fruit flies regulate freezing behavior as a function of group size and identify motion by others, and neurons that detect it, as key to this process.