Spatial memory-based behaviors for locating sources of odor plumes

摘要

BackgroundMany animals must locate odorant point sources during key behaviors such as reproduction, foraging and habitat selection. Cues from such sources are typically distributed as air- or water-borne chemical plumes, characterized by high intermittency due to environmental turbulence and episodically rapid changes in position and orientation during wind or current shifts. Well-known examples of such behaviors include male moths, which have physiological and behavioral specializations for locating the sources of pheromone plumes emitted by females. Male moths and many other plume-following organisms exhibit “counter-turning” behavior, in which they execute a pre-planned sequence of cross-stream movements spanning all or part of an odorant plume, combined with upstream movements towards the source. Despite its ubiquity and ecological importance, theoretical investigation of counter-turning has so far been limited to a small subset of plausible behavioral algorithms based largely on classical biased random walk gradient-climbing or oscillator models.