Odor motion sensing enhances navigation of complex plumes

Odor plumes in the wild are spatially complex and rapidly fluctuating structures carried by turbulent airflows. To successfully navigate plumes in search of food and mates, insects must extract and integrate multiple features of the odor signal, including odor identity, intensity, and timing. Effective navigation requires balancing these multiple streams of olfactory information and integrating them with other sensory inputs, including visual and mechanosensory cues. Studies dating back a century have indicated that, of these many sensory inputs, the wind provides the main directional cue in turbulent plumes, leading to the longstanding model of insect odor navigation as odor-elicited upwind motion. Here, we show that Drosophila shape their navigational decisions using an additional directional cue – the direction of motion of odors – which they detect using temporal correlations in the odor signal between their two antennae. Using a high-resolution virtual reality paradigm to deliver s...

自然环境中的气味羽流（odor plumes）是由湍流气流携带的空间结构复杂且快速波动的体系。为了在气味羽流中成功导航以寻找食物和配偶，昆虫必须提取并整合气味信号的多种特征，包括气味身份、强度和时序。有效的导航需要平衡这些多股嗅觉信息流，并将其与其他感官输入（包括视觉和机械感官线索）相整合。一个世纪以来的研究表明，在这些众多感官输入中，风是湍流羽流中的主要方向线索，这促成了昆虫气味导航的长期模型——气味诱发的逆风运动。在此，我们表明果蝇（Drosophila）利用一种额外的方向线索——气味的运动方向——来形成其导航决策，它们通过两只触角之间气味信号的时间相关性来检测该线索。通过高分辨率虚拟现实范式（virtual reality paradigm）来传递s...