Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/45192

Courtship behavior is highly divergent in Diptera, especially in Drosophila. The typical courtship of Drosophila melanogaster is an elaborate repertoire including elements of orienting, tapping, scissoring, circling, wing-vibrating, licking and attempting to copulate, in which males and females send and receive visual, chemical, tactile and acoustic signals from each other. The divergence of courtship behavior reflects the phylogeny to some extent. Loss or gain of certain elements, which cause qualitative differences in courtship behavior among species, are very common in Drosophila. On the other hand, rapid quantitative changes in sexual signals tend to occur between sympatric, closely related species but not between allopatric, close relatives. In this review, we assemble available information on courtship behavior, compare its behavioral elements across 135 species of 30 species groups from three genera of the Drosophilidae, excepting the Hawaiian picture-wing Drosophila with a bizarre courtship pattern, and discuss functions of each element in relation to its loss or gain and possible evolutionary mechanisms underlying the sexual signal divergence.