Individuals are likely to prioritise food over sex after being deprived of both, according to researchers at the University of Birmingham, who studied this behavioural conflict in fruit flies.

A new study, published in Current Biology, pinpointed the precise neuronal impulses triggered in flies' brains when faced with the critical choices of feeding or mating. Fruit flies, or Drosophila, are commonly used in neuroscience research that can be used to give insights into how more complex brains behave. This is because Drosophila exhibit complex behaviours such as memory and learning, but these are controlled by a comparatively simpler brain, with just around 100,000 neurons. The human brain, in comparison, has around 86 billion neurons.