Meeting Abstract
Animal behavior frequently requires the integration of information from multiple sensory modalities. In many moving animals, vision is a dominant modality, but visual information is only useful for movement in the context of the body’s own position and motion. How do animals integrate visual motion with proprioception and mechanoreception to coordinate their movement? In flies (Diptera), specialized hindwings known as halteres detect body rotations and guide wing steering and head movements. We used quantitative behavioral analysis to examine how the fly nervous system uses visual and mechanical information to coordinate specific flight-related behaviors. Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were tethered to rigid pins and placed in the center of an arena consisting of several panels of LEDs. We measured the flies’ wing steering and head movement behaviors in response to different visual stimuli, and compared the responses of flies with their halteres removed or glued to their thorax to the responses of intact flies. We noted that wing-steering responses to small moving figures were unaffected by haltere removal, but responses to moving wide-field stimuli were reduced when the halteres were glued or absent. Movements of the head were affected by haltere removal at higher speeds: though haltereless flies were still capable of following a wide-field stimulus with their gaze, they showed no amplitude modulation of the optomotor response in their head movements. Taken together, our data show that the influence of halteres on both wing steering and head movement behavior is dependent on behavioral and visual context. These results suggest a cross-modal role of haltere input on visually guided behaviors.
