- 作者：Floris van聽Breugel ; Michael聽H. Dickinson
- 刊名：Current Biology
- 出版年：3 February, 2014
- 年：2014
- 卷：24
- 期：3
- 页码：274-286
- 全文大小：4128 K
Summary
Background
For a fruit fly, locating fermenting fruit where it can feed, find mates, and lay eggs is an essential and difficult task requiring the integration of olfactory and visual cues. Here, we develop an approach to correlate flies鈥?free-flight behavior with their olfactory experience under different wind and visual conditions, yielding new insight into plume tracking based on over 70聽hr of data.Results
To localize an odor source, flies exhibit three iterative, independent, reflex-driven behaviors, which remain constant through repeated encounters of the same stimulus: (1) 190 卤 75聽ms after encountering a plume, flies increase their flight speed and turn upwind, using visual cues to determine wind direction. Due to this substantial response delay, flies pass through the plume shortly after entering it. (2) 450 卤 165聽ms after losing the plume, flies initiate a series of vertical and horizontal casts, using visual cues to maintain a crosswind heading. (3) After sensing an attractive odor, flies exhibit an enhanced attraction to small visual features, which increases their probability of finding the plume鈥檚 source.
Conclusions
Due to plume structure and sensory-motor delays, a fly鈥檚 olfactory experience during foraging flights consists of short bursts of odor stimulation. As a consequence, delays in the onset of crosswind casting and the increased attraction to visual features are necessary behavioral components for efficiently locating an odor source. Our results provide a quantitative behavioral background for elucidating the neural basis of plume tracking using genetic and physiological approaches.