Experimental and statistical reevaluation provides no evidence for courtship song rhythms. Author David Stern, Jan Clemens, Philip Coen, Adam Calhoun, John Hogenesch, Ben Arthur, Mala Murthy Publication Year 2017 Type Journal Article Abstract From 1980 to 1992, a series of influential papers reported on the discovery, genetics, and evolution of a periodic cycling of the interval between male courtship song pulses. The molecular mechanisms underlying this periodicity were never described. To reinitiate investigation of this phenomenon, we previously performed automated segmentation of songs but failed to detect the proposed rhythm [Arthur BJ, et al. (2013) 11:11; Stern DL (2014) 12:38]. Kyriacou et al. [Kyriacou CP, et al. (2017) 114:1970-1975] report that we failed to detect song rhythms because () our flies did not sing enough and () our segmenter did not identify many of the song pulses. Kyriacou et al. manually annotated a subset of our recordings and reported that two strains displayed rhythms with genotype-specific periodicity, in agreement with their original reports. We cannot replicate this finding and show that the manually annotated data, the original automatically segmented data, and a new dataset provide no evidence for either the existence of song rhythms or song periodicity differences between genotypes. Furthermore, we have reexamined our methods and analysis and find that our automated segmentation method was not biased to prevent detection of putative song periodicity. We conclude that there is no evidence for the existence of courtship song rhythms. Keywords Animals, Drosophila, Drosophila Proteins, Female, Male, Sexual Behavior, Animal, Vocalization, Animal, Courtship, Drosophila melanogaster, Singing Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Volume 114 Issue 37 Pages 9978-9983 Date Published 2017 Sep 12 ISSN Number 1091-6490 DOI 10.1073/pnas.1707471114 Alternate Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A PMCID PMC5604024 PMID 28851830 PubMedPubMed CentralGoogle ScholarBibTeXEndNote X3 XML