Meeting Abstract
American cockroaches, Periplaneta americana, can track an odor plume even when all but a small portion of one antenna has been lost. Our previous behavioral work shows that bilateral symmetry is not predictive of behavior. Tracking performance improves with increasing amounts of antenna present whether bilateral symmetry is preserved or not. Moreover, published neural recordings and histological data suggest there is a spatial map of the antenna in the antennal lobe of the animal’s brain. These observations, combined with our behavioral data lead us to propose a heuristic featuring spatial integration across an antenno-topic map to describe how P. americana tracks an odor plume. Here we use an agent-based model to test our proposed heuristic along with several other heuristics describing classic tracking strategies. Preliminary results have shown greater success rates across heuristics when using odor-on vs odor-off antenna units, than when using relative concentrations measured by each antenna unit. This study was supported by NSF grant IOS-1121498 to MAW.
