Current Biology
Volume 24, Issue 3, 3 February 2014, Pages 274-286
Journal home page for Current Biology

Article
Plume-Tracking Behavior of Flying Drosophila Emerges from a Set of Distinct Sensory-Motor Reflexes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.12.023Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Highlights

  • Flies’ odor sensation is largely determined by self-motion

  • Flies surge upwind using visual cues 190 ± 75 ms after encountering attractive odors

  • Flies cast crosswind using visual feedback 450 ± 165 ms after odor plume loss

  • Perception of an attractive odor increases saliency of high-contrast features

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’ free-flight behavior with their olfactory experience under different wind and visual conditions, yielding new insight into plume tracking based on over 70 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 ± 75 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 ± 165 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’s source.

Conclusions

Due to plume structure and sensory-motor delays, a fly’s 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.

Cited by (0)