Insect behavioral evidence of spatial memories during environmental reconfiguration

Abstract

Insects are great explorers, able to navigate through long-distance trajectories and successfully find their way back. Their navigational routes cross dynamic environments suggesting adaptation to novel configurations. Arthropods and vertebrates share neural organizational principles and it has been shown that rodents modulate their neural spatial representation accordingly with environmental changes. However, it is unclear whether insects reflexively adapt to environmental changes or retain memory traces of previously explored situations. We sought to disambiguate between insect behavior at environmental novel situations and reconfiguration conditions. An immersive mixed-reality multi-sensory setup was built to replicate multisensory cues. We have designed an experimental setup where female crickets Gryllus Bimaculatus were trained to move towards paired auditory and visual cues during primarily phonotactic driven behavior. We hypothesized that insects were capable of identifying sensory modifications in known environments. Our results show that, regardless of the animals history, novel situation conditions did not compromise the animals performance and navigational directionality towards a novel target location. However, in trials where visual and auditory stimuli were spatially decoupled, the animals heading variability towards a previously known location significantly increased. Our findings showed that crickets are able to behaviorally manifest environmental reconfiguration, suggesting the encoding for spatial representation.

Geometry-based navigation in the dark: Layout symmetry facilitates spatial learning in the house cricket,Acheta domesticus, in the absence of visual cues

“…Supporting, though indirect, evidence for the internalized representation of space could be formulated on the basis of research on the memory capacity of insects (Collett et al, 2013;Mizunami, Weibrecht, & Strausfeld, 1998;Santos-Pata, Escuredo, Mathews, & Verschure, 2018). Tested symmetric arenas are computationally easier to encode (e.g., all walls and angles of a square arena are equal) in comparison to asymmetric quadrilateral arenas (in which all walls and angles differ).…”

Comparison of Multipiscivore Foraging Success on Native and Invasive Prey Fish under Variable Light Intensities

“…Predator–prey interactions often determine aquatic community structure, with a multitude of factors affecting interactions, outcomes, and effects (Carpenter et al 1985; Higham et al 2015). These factors include the sensory abilities of the predator and prey (Liem 1978; Lundvall et al 1999; Beauchamp et al 1999) and the effects of environmental variables on these sensory systems (Utne‐Palm 2002; Lönnstedt et al 2013; Santos‐Pata et al 2018). Previous studies on predator–prey interactions have focused primarily on interspecific interactions of a single visually mediated predator and one prey species (O’Brien 1979; Nielsen 1980; Vogel and Beauchamp 1999; Mazur and Beauchamp 2003; Hansen et al 2013; Jönsson et al 2013; Keyler et al 2015, 2019).…”