"Sociality – or group formation – offers different evolutionary advantages,
the most important one being protection. Animals in groups dilute their
chances of being captured, they have more time to dedicate to non-
defensive behaviors, and they can use cues and signals from group
members to detect potential threats more efficiently. As a result of these
advantages, many vertebrate and invertebrate prey species form social
groups, in which they continuously influence one-another. In an attempt to
uncover the behavioral and neural basis of group behavior, we studied
Drosophila melanogaster, an organism that is increasingly considered to
be a social animal. Drosophila displays social buffering of freezing, the
defensive behavior where animals become motionless in order to become
invisible to predators. Building on this finding, we discovered that social
buffering is even stronger under higher levels of threat.(...)"
