Correlated decision making across multiple phases of olfactory guided search in Drosophila

Abstract

All motile organisms must search for food, often requiring the exploration of heterogeneous environments across a wide range of spatial scales. Recent field and laboratory experiments with the fruit fly, Drosophila, have revealed that they employ different strategies across these regimes, including kilometer scale straight-path flights between resource clusters, zig-zagging trajectories to follow odor plumes, and local search on foot after landing. However, little is known about the extent to which experiences in one regime might influence decisions in another. To determine how a flies' odor plume tracking during flight is related to their behavior after landing, I tracked the behavior of individually labelled fruit flies as they explored an array of three odor emitting, but food-barren, objects. The distance flies travelled on the objects in search of food was correlated with the time elapsed between their visits, suggesting that their in-flight plume tracking and on-foot local search behaviors are interconnected through a lossy memory-like process.