Navigating a diversity of turbulent plumes is enhanced by sensing complementary temporal features of odor signals

Abstract

We and others have shown that during odor plume navigation, walking Drosophila melanogaster bias their motion upwind in response to both the frequency of their encounters with the odor (Demir et al., 2020), and the intermittency of the odor signal, i.e. the fraction of time the signal is above a detection threshold (Alvarez-Salvado et al., 2018). Here we combine and simplify previous mathematical models that recapitulated these data to investigate the benefits of sensing both of these temporal features, and how these benefits depend on the spatiotemporal statistics of the odor plume. Through agent-based simulations, we find that navigators that only use frequency or intermittency perform well in some environments – achieving maximal performance when gains are near those inferred from experiment – but fail in others. Robust performance across diverse environments requires both temporal modalities. However, we also find a steep tradeoff when using both sensors simultaneously, suggesting a strong benefit to modulating how much each sensor is weighted, rather than using both in a fixed combination across plumes.

Odor source distance is predictable from a time-history of odor statistics for large scale outdoor plumes

“…Many of these animals are exquisitely sensitive to the precise timing [18], spatial structure [19], and history of odor encounters [20]. Both timing and statistics of the olfactory experience have been shown to drive behavioral decisions [4,21,22,23,24]. However, precisely what information can practically be extracted from the statistics of these olfactory signals over large spatial scales is an open area of investigation.…”