The abundance and pervasiveness of new technological platforms and devices that can mediate social interactions would appear to suggest that we are not only finding new channels for communication, but that our social world is being enlarged and transformed.
There is evidence that chemical communication is used extensively in bats to mediate social interactions, but little is known about how chemical signals might affect roosting choices [7], [8].
No molecules that mediate social interactions between Drosophila larvae are known.
In order to test the hypothesis that close calls serve to mediate social interactions, we used a multiple logistic regression with binomial error (link = logit; e.g., Bolker et al. 2009).
Nocturnal animals rely predominantly on olfactory cues to mediate social interactions and sexual communication; these species generally have a highly developed sense of smell (Jaeger and Gergits 1979; Dawley 1984; Mathis 1990; Gillette et al. 2000; Palmer 2004).
Similar threshold-dependent changes in behavior have been observed during optogenetic stimulation of medial amygdala and hypothalamic cell types that mediate social interactions (Hong et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2014), suggesting that it may be a general property of some behavior control circuits.
