Meeting Abstract
Most animals must physically navigate the world towards goals whilst avoiding obstacles. Both elements demand an animal to update its navigational course en route. For dragonflies, these problems are embodied in the daily struggle to hunt enough to eat, navigate to and from perches, and to compete in possibly agonistic conspecific interactions. The selective pressures on the steering requirements of each task may be completely different, despite some conceptual similarities. For instance, while prey, perch, and conspecific may all at times be moving targets, the flight capabilities of conspecifics will rival the dragonflies own, while perching may require more delicate final approaches. The diversity of phenomenological models for flight behaviors allow us to extract unifying features of flight trajectories with which to make comparisons across animal species. However, this approach falls short in addressing the mechanistic implementation of the behavior. To understand how an aerial animal implements a specific visually guided task, we must examine all the body gestures from gaze control to body reactions. We combined high-speed photogrammetry and motion capture techniques to digitize dragonflies as they performed goal-directed visually guided behavior in a custom flight arena in the lab. We have previously shown that dragonflies incorporate predictive and reactive control during prey interception via a series of internal models. This prompted us to design a series of experiments to identify predictive and reactive control motifs in the behavior.
