Meeting Abstract
The structure of the odor tracking behavior of flying or swimming animals arise from: (1) changes in flows and odor plumes resulting from environmental differences, (2) differences in the odor inputs of animals flying or swimming rapidly vs. walking slowly through their environments, or (3) different control rules used whether walking or flying. It has been proposed that insects walking slowly along plumes in the boundary layer use spatial cues by comparing across their bilaterally symmetrical antennae, while insects flying rapidly through plumes in free stream flows may use the timing of odor encounters. Insects are ideal organisms to test these ideas because many of them track odors while flying and walking, providing the opportunity to observe behavioral changes that occur as they change their mode of locomotion. Studies of male oriental fruit moths, Grapholita molesta, transitioning from flying to walking plume tracking, show that the tracks of intact individuals change from typical side-to-side zigzag in flight to walking a nearly straight line to the odor source. Individuals that have had one antenna removed change from symmetrical zigzag tracks identical to flying males, to walking tracks that loop toward their intact antenna (left or right). Sometimes walking in loops can result from loss of contact with odor and has been interpreted as a local search behavior. To resolve whether the looping tracks of one antenna males resulted from a switch from temporal to spatial odor comparisons or the moths had initiated a local search after losing contact with the plume we removed the odor source during plume tracking walking. This work was supported by NSF grant IOS-1121498.
