Meeting Abstract
Animals often use their sense of smell to locate food, identify mates and predators, and find suitable living habitats. Odor molecules are dispersed from their source by turbulent wind or water currents. In both terrestrial and aquatic environments, the instantaneous temporal and spatial distribution of odors is complex, and odor plumes are often composed of filaments of chemicals at high concentrations that are adjacent to fluid with little or no odor. Navigation in turbulent chemical plumes has typically been considered a spatial information problem where individuals aim to path towards higher concentration. However, concentration information alone is too irregular in turbulent plumes to explain search speed and accuracy of many animals that undergo search. Recent discoveries of bursting olfactory neurons in the spiny lobster, Panulirus argus, suggest a mechanism for accurately sampling the temporal structure of chemical signals. We believe that incorporating a temporal element to chemical cues, such as intermittency encoding, is necessary to provide plume information on time scales relevant for informing efficient search behavior. We use a computational fluid dynamics model, as well as full-scale flume experiments using planar induced fluorescence, to characterize the spatial-temporal signal encountered in a turbulent odorant plume.
