Meeting Abstract

85.4  Monday, Jan. 6 11:00  Odor tracking behavior of fruit flies in the presence of landmark cues SAXENA, N.**; NATESAN, D.; SANE, S.P.; National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India; National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India; National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India niteshs@ncbs.res.in

Flying insects rely heavily on visual cues for flight. For example, during pheromone tracking, moths are known to utilize surrounding visual patterns to maintain upwind heading. Similarly, fruit flies also require wide-field visual cues to reach the vicinity of the odor source location. Whereas odor cues in combination with far-field visual cues may serve to attract a fly towards the general area of odor source, landmark cues may be important to pinpoint the location of an odor source. Thus, we hypothesized that the presence of multiple landmarks or landmarks that are dissociated from odor sources will elicit a search behavior that is dependent on the distribution of visual objects. We studied the behavior of the fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster as they honed in on the odor source within a wind tunnel. Our results show that in presence of multiple closely-spaced but identical visual cues, flies often make errors in identifying the exact location of the odor source. Moreover, in experiments where the odor cues are dissociated from visual cues, flies are often likely to be attracted to high-contrast visual cues in the vicinity of the odor cues. Thus, these experiments highlight the importance of landmark cues in the odor tracking behavior.