Fruit flies

Katherine Nagel discusses how fruit flies navigate using odour and how ring models can explain the short-term memory involved.

…that learning reduces the lifespan of fruit flies by 20% when feeding is stopped (Mery and Kawecki, 2005). Thus the brain should carefully regulate learning. For instance, flies stop some forms of memory formation to survive upon starvation (Placais and Preat, 2013). To examine when it is best to halt energy-costly learning, we used a computational reinforcement learning model which takes the animal’s energy budget in

…organisms like bees, ants, and fruit flies with tractable nervous systems seem able to implement this computation (H

For visual perception to be unaffected by viewing conditions, animals must adapt their sensitivity to changing visual statistics, such as mean illumination. Consistently, photoreceptors in many species control their luminance gain and encode relative changes in luminance [1,2], termed contrast. However, this early gain control is insufficient for luminance invariant contrast estimation in dynamic conditions. Sudden transitions to dim or bright environment would lead to an erroneous, reduced or enhanced perception of contrasts, thus imposing a two-way challenge on contrast estimation. Yet, visu

Our work concerns the general problem of adaptive behaviour in response to predatory threats, and of the neural mechanisms underlying a choice between strategies. When faced with a threat, an animal must decide whether to freeze, reducing its chances of being noticed, or to flee to the safety of a refuge. Animals from fish to primates choose between these two alternatives when confronted by an attacking predator, a choice that largely depends on the context in which the threat occurs. Recent work has made strides identifying the pre-motor circuits, and their inputs, which control freezing beha

…very little work has been done on fruit flies. This is even though fruit flies have served as a model organism for many complex behavioural paradigms. To fill

…muscle control system of phasmids and fruit flies. I will present insights into the neural basis of speed co