Designing the work week in healthcare: a systems agenda for safer, sustainable work.

To survive the evolutionary race, insects must interpret multiple sensory inputs and respond optimally to environmental cues. In , sensory inputs are processed through various modalities like e.g. vision, olfaction, gustation (Currier and Nagel ; Oh et al. ). In a social context, the flies use pheromones, i.e. chemicals, detected either through olfaction in case of air-borne chemicals or through gustation in case of non-volatile contact chemicals (Kohl et al. ). These pheromones are pivotal in many key behaviors such as courtship, mating, aggression, and aggregation (Fernández and Kravitz ; Wang and Anderson ). pheromones have been extensively studied, and continue to be actively investigated. Many pheromones are produced predominantly by one sex and act in combination with other chemical cues to elicit specific behavioral responses. For instance, female-specific compounds such as 7,11-heptacosadiene and 7,11-nonacosadiene along with other pheromones enhance female attractiveness to males (Antony and Jallon ; Marcillac et al. ). In some cases, a single pheromone can have multiple roles acting as an essential part of a pheromone blend eliciting different behaviors in different contexts. For example 11-cis-vaccenyl acetate (cVA), a well-studied pheromone produced in male ejaculatory bulbs (Butterworth ) and transferred to females during copulation, has multiple behavioral functions (Ejima ). In males, cVA acts as an anti-aphrodisiac (Zawistowski and Richmond ) and promotes male-male aggression (Wang and Anderson ), whereas in virgin females, it increases sexual receptivity (Kurtovic et al. ). When applied to food, cVA can increase the food’s attractiveness to females in a wind tunnel assay (Bartelt et al. ; Cazalé-Debat et al. ; Tolassy et al. ). In flies reared in isolation, acute exposure to cVA can trigger strong aggression (Liu et al. ). cVA released by ovipositing females governs joint oviposition (Duménil et al. ). These examples show that, pheromonal communication is highly dynamic and the response depends not only on the pheromone, but on the context, the pheromone combination, the background in which the animal detects the pheromone and other spatial parameters. Despite extensive research on pheromone-mediated behaviors, most of these studies often focus on contact assays. Fly interactions are often studied in small circular arenas with a diameter of 1–2 cm and a height of less than 0.5 cm (Gil-Martí et al. ; von Philipsborn et al. ).