Topic: desert locust

Choosing among spatially distributed options is a central challenge for animals, from deciding among alternative potential food sources or refuges, to choosing with whom to associate. Here, using an integrated theoretical and experimental approach (employing immersive Virtual Reality), with both invertebrate and vertebrate models—the fruit fly, desert locust and zebrafish—we consider the recursive interplay between movement and collective vectorial integration in the brain during decision-making regarding options (potential ‘targets’) in space. We reveal that the brain repeatedly breaks multi-

A head direction (HD) cell fires when an animal faces a particular azimuthal direction (Taube and Bassett 2003). Recurrent connections among HD cells create a ring-attractor network that continuously encodes HD (Ajabi et al. 2023). Indeed, in the Drosophila HD system, three rings interact to linearly integrate angular head velocity (AHV), with two of the rings receiving countervailing velocity-dependent inputs (Turner-Evans et al. 2017). In contrast, for the desert locust an alternative mechanism has been proposed (Zittrell et al. 2023; Pabst et al. 2024). There, velocity modulates synaptic