A new study has revealed that females take just 15 minutes to decide on mate.
In a study of fruit fly brains, the final decision about whether to accept or reject a male's courtship comes down to the option that is the most exciting and the decision appears to be generated by a very small number of excitatory neurons that use acetylcholine as their neurotransmitter located in three brain regions.
Researchers from Case Western Reserve -University in Cleveland, Ohio, said that this study provides the framework to understand how decisions are generated and suggests that a decision is reached because that option is literally the most exciting.
In choosing a mate, females select traits they like that will be -inherited by their offspring and the study found one gene, named dati, that, when mutated, rendered the female flies incapable of deciding whether to mate or not and the females that are mutant for just this single gene can never decide to accept males, no matter how hard the males try to impress them.
The study was published in the journal PLOS Biology.
