Dataset Information

Mosquitoes Use Vision to Associate Odor Plumes with Thermal Targets.

ABSTRACT: All moving animals, including flies, sharks, and humans, experience a dynamic sensory landscape that is a function of both their trajectory through space and the distribution of stimuli in the environment. This is particularly apparent for mosquitoes, which use a combination of olfactory, visual, and thermal cues to locate hosts. Mosquitoes are thought to detect suitable hosts by the presence of a sparse CO? plume, which they track by surging upwind and casting crosswind. Upon approach, local cues such as heat and skin volatiles help them identify a landing site. Recent evidence suggests that thermal attraction is gated by the presence of CO?, although this conclusion was based experiments in which the actual flight trajectories of the animals were unknown and visual cues were not studied. Using a three-dimensional tracking system, we show that rather than gating heat sensing, the detection of CO? actually activates a strong attraction to visual features. This visual reflex guides the mosquitoes to potential hosts where they are close enough to detect thermal cues. By experimentally decoupling the olfactory, visual, and thermal cues, we show that the motor reactions to these stimuli are independently controlled. Given that humans become visible to mosquitoes at a distance of 5-15 m, visual cues play a critical intermediate role in host localization by coupling long-range plume tracking to behaviors that require short-range cues. Rather than direct neural coupling, the separate sensory-motor reflexes are linked as a result of the interaction between the animal's reactions and the spatial structure of the stimuli in the environment.

SUBMITTER: van Breugel F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4546539 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Mosquitoes Use Vision to Associate Odor Plumes with Thermal Targets.

van Breugel Floris F Riffell Jeff J Fairhall Adrienne A Dickinson Michael H MH

Current biology : CB 20150716 16

All moving animals, including flies, sharks, and humans, experience a dynamic sensory landscape that is a function of both their trajectory through space and the distribution of stimuli in the environment. This is particularly apparent for mosquitoes, which use a combination of olfactory, visual, and thermal cues to locate hosts. Mosquitoes are thought to detect suitable hosts by the presence of a sparse CO₂ plume, which they track by surging upwind and casting crosswind. Upon approach, local cu ...[more]

PMID: 26190071

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Project description:BackgroundTurbulent fluid landscapes impose temporal patterning upon chemical signals, and the dynamical neuronal responses to patterned input vary across the olfactory receptor repertoire in flies, moths, and locusts. Sensory transformations exhibit low pass filtering that ultimately results in perceptual fusion of temporally transient sensory signals. For example, humans perceive a sufficiently fast flickering light as continuous, but the frequency threshold at which this fusion occurs varies with wavelength. Although the summed frequency sensitivity of the fly antenna has been examined to a considerable extent, it is unknown how intermittent odor signals are integrated to influence plume tracking behavior independent of wind cues, and whether temporal fusion for behavioral tracking might vary according to the odor encountered.ResultsHere we have adopted a virtual reality flight simulator to study the dynamics of plume tracking under different experimental conditions. Flies tethered in a magnetic field actively track continuous (non-intermittent) plumes of vinegar, banana, or ethyl butyrate with equal precision. However, pulsing these plumes at varying frequency reveals that the threshold rate, above which flies track the plume as if it were continuous, is unique for each odorant tested. Thus, the capability of a fly to navigate an intermittent plume depends on the particular odorant being tracked during flight. Finally, we measured antennal field potential responses to an intermittent plume, found that receptor dynamics track the temporal pattern of the odor stimulus and therefore do not limit the observed behavioral temporal fusion limits.ConclusionsThis study explores the flies' ability to track odor plumes that are temporally intermittent. We were surprised to find that the perceptual critical fusion limit, determined behaviorally, is strongly dependent on odor identity. Antennal field potential recordings indicate that peripheral processing of temporal cues faithfully follow rapid odor transients above the rates that can be resolved behaviorally. These results indicate that (1) higher order circuits create a perceptually continuous signal from an intermittent sensory one, and that (2) this transformation varies with odorant rather than being constrained by sensory-motor integration, thus (3) offering an entry point for examining the mechanisms of rapid olfactory decision making in an ecological context.

Dataset Information

Mosquitoes Use Vision to Associate Odor Plumes with Thermal Targets.

Publications

Mosquitoes Use Vision to Associate Odor Plumes with Thermal Targets.

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