Odor localization requires visual feedback during free flight in Drosophila melanogaster.
TL;DR: A simple model based on the statistics of flight behavior supports the hypothesis that a subtle influence on these behaviors is sufficient to lead a fly to its food, and suggests that flies do require visual feedback generated by vertical edges.
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Abstract: Adult fruit flies follow attractive odors associated with food and oviposition sites through widely varied visual landscapes. To examine the interaction between olfactory and visual cues during search behavior, we recorded three-dimensional flight trajectories as individuals explored controlled sensory landscapes. When presented with the source of an attractive odor invisibly embedded in the floor of a 1 m arena, flies spend most of their time hovering back and forth over the source when flying within a randomly textured visual background but fail to localize the source when searching within a uniform white surround. To test whether flies are associating unique features of the visual background with the strength of odor cues, we flew them within arenas containing evenly spaced vertical stripes. Flies readily localized the odor when flying within visual landscapes lacking azimuthal landmarks provided that vertical edges were present. Flies failed to localize odor when flying within a background pattern consisting of horizontal stripes. These results suggest that, whereas flies do not require spatially unique visual patterns to localize an odor source, they do require visual feedback generated by vertical edges. Quantitative shifts in several components of flight behavior accompanied successful odor localization. Flies decrease flight altitude, turn more often and approach visually textured walls of the arena near an odor source. A simple model based on the statistics of flight behavior supports the hypothesis that a subtle influence on these behaviors is sufficient to lead a fly to its food.
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Citations
Free-Flight Odor Tracking in Drosophila Is Consistent with an Optimal Intermittent Scale-Free Search
Andy M. Reynolds,Mark A. Frye +1 more
TL;DR: This analysis reveals that the control of these visually independent saccades and the flight intervals between them constitute an optimal scale-free active searching strategy in Drosophila, and shows that searching is intermittent, such that active searching phases randomly alternate with relocation phases.
The aerodynamics of hovering flight in Drosophila.
TL;DR: 3D infrared high-speed video is captured of the continuous wing and body kinematics of free-flying fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, during hovering and slow forward flight to analyze the requirements for hovering and compare the wing motion and aerodynamic forces of free and tethered flies.
Multi-camera real-time three-dimensional tracking of multiple flying animals
TL;DR: A system capable of tracking the three-dimensional position and body orientation of animals such as flies and birds that operates with less than 40 ms latency and can track multiple animals simultaneously is described.
268
Plume-Tracking Behavior of Flying Drosophila Emerges from a Set of Distinct Sensory-Motor Reflexes
TL;DR: 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, provides a quantitative behavioral background for elucidating the neural basis of plumetracking using genetic and physiological approaches.
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Drosophila's view on insect vision.
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