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Associative learning allows animals to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment. Whether and what aspects of such acquired traits may be transmittable across generations remains unclear. Using prolonged olfactory training and subsequent…
Aging affects almost all aspects of an organism -- its morphology, its physiology, its behavior. Isolating which biological mechanisms are regulating these changes, however, has proven difficult, potentially due to our inability to…
The fruit fly Drosophila is a classic model organism to study adaptation as well as the relationship between genetic variation and phenotypes. Although associated bacterial communities might be important for many aspects of Drosophila…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
Animal behavior and neural recordings show that the brain is able to measure both the intensity of an odor and the timing of odor encounters. However, whether intensity or timing of odor detections is more informative for olfactory-driven…
Living systems continually respond to signals from the surrounding environment. Survival requires that their responses adapt quickly and robustly to the changes in the environment. One particularly challenging example is olfactory…
The olfactory system of male moths is exquisitely sensitive to pheromones emitted by females and transported in the environment by atmospheric turbulence. Moths respond to minute amounts of pheromones and their behavior is sensitive to the…
This article provides a background and descriptive analysis of insect memory and the coding of olfactory sensation in Drosophila, presenting graphs and summary statistics from a large dataset of neurons and synapses that was recently made…
The host's odor serves as a critical biological tracking signal in the host-seeking process of mosquitoes, and its heterogeneity significantly influences the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. In this study, we propose a…
Olfactory navigation is observed across species and plays a crucial role in locating resources for survival. In the laboratory, understanding the behavioral strategies and neural circuits underlying odor-taxis requires a detailed…
Automated tracking of animal movement allows analyses that would not otherwise be possible by providing great quantities of data. The additional capability of tracking in realtime - with minimal latency - opens up the experimental…
Most animals possess the ability to actuate a vast diversity of movements, ostensibly constrained only by morphology and physics. In practice, however, a frequent assumption in behavioral science is that most of an animal's activities can…
Animals use stereo sampling of odor concentration to localize sources and follow odor trails. We analyze the dynamics of a bilateral model that depends on the simultaneous comparison between odor concentrations detected by left and right…
Animal behavior spans many timescales, from short, seconds-scale actions to circadian rhythms over many hours to life-long changes during aging. Most quantitative behavior studies have focused on short-timescale behaviors such as locomotion…
Insects exhibit remarkable cognitive skills in the field and several cognitive abilities have been demonstrated in Drosophila in the laboratory. By devising an ethologically relevant experimental setup that also allows comparison of…
Tiny flying insects, such as Drosophila melanogaster, fly by flapping their wings at frequencies faster than their brains are able to process. To do so, they rely on self-oscillation: dynamic instability, leading to emergent oscillation,…
Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be…
Decoding the direction of translating objects in front of cluttered moving backgrounds, accurately and efficiently, is still a challenging problem. In nature, lightweight and low-powered flying insects apply motion vision to detect a moving…
Early olfactory pathway responses to the presentation of an odor exhibit remarkably similar dynamical behavior across phyla from insects to mammals, and frequently involve transitions among quiescence, collective network oscillations, and…
Olfactory search in turbulent environments is a sensorimotor challenge solved with remarkable efficiency by many animals, yet replicating this ability in artificial systems remains difficult because detections are intermittent and wind…