Social interactions can alter gene expression in the brain, and ...(tential competitor something the bird wo...)

"What's more significant to a bird than hearing another bird singing?" Clayton said. "This is going on in the equivalent of our auditory cortex and association cortex, so this is pretty high-level stuff going on in the brain. And this was happening in more or less real time by very naturalistic stimuli."

Reading Clayton's 1992 paper "was a eureka moment for me," Robinson said.

"This just brought it out into the social world, saying that this occurred in animals that have to make a living in the real world and pay attention to a lot of nuanced stimuli," he said. "So I think that was really a very important step in our understanding."

In his own work, Robinson has used microarrays to study this phenomenon on a larger scale and has found that literally thousands of genes turn on or off in the honey bee brain in response to social stimuli. One such gene, called for (for foraging), was originally discovered in fruit flies by Marla Sokolowski at the University of Toronto. Flies that carry different versions of for show different types of foraging behavior. Each version gives its bearer a behavioral advantage in certain environmental conditions.

Robinson knew that honey bee workers start out working in the hive as nurses and only later graduate to the role of foragers. Perhaps, he reasoned, even though the differences in for are etched in the DNA in flies, this same gene in the bee might be more dynamic and help influence the transition from hive work to foraging.

In a study published in 2002, Robinson and his colleagues reported that expression of for did in fact increase in the brains of honey bees as they developed into foragers, and manipulating its expression caused bees to forage precociously.

The researchers also found that soci
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