Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass
Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1904308116
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发表时间：
2019-07-09
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
el Jundi, Basil
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Dacke, Marie;Bell, Adrian T. A.;el Jundi, Basil
南非滚球屎甲虫表现出一种独特的定向行为，以避免对食物的竞争：在将一块粪便形成球状后，它们会高效地沿着直线路径带着粪便逃离粪堆。为了跟踪它们的航向，这些动物使用太阳等天体信号作为方位参考。在这里，我们展示了风也可以作为滚球甲虫的指导线索。我们证明，这种机械感应罗盘信号只在天光信号难以阅读时使用，即当太阳接近天顶时。这就提出了一个问题，即甲虫如何结合多模式方位输入来获得稳健的航向估计。为了研究这一点，我们在一个严格控制的室内竞技场进行了行为实验。这表明甲虫记录了太阳和风提供的方向信息，并可以加权使用这些信息。此外，方向信息可以在这两种感觉模式之间传递，这表明它们结合在甲虫大脑的空间记忆网络中。这种相对于主流视觉和机械感官场景的指南针提示首选项的灵活使用提供了一种简单而有效的机制，可在一天中的任何时间实现精确的指南针定位。
South African ball-rolling dung beetles exhibit a unique orientation behavior to avoid competition for food: after forming a piece of dung into a ball, they efficiently escape with it from the dung pile along a straight-line path. To keep track of their heading, these animals use celestial cues, such as the sun, as an orientation reference. Here we show that wind can also be used as a guiding cue for the ball-rolling beetles. We demonstrate that this mechanosensory compass cue is only used when skylight cues are difficult to read, i.e., when the sun is close to the zenith. This raises the question of how the beetles combine multimodal orientation input to obtain a robust heading estimate. To study this, we performed behavioral experiments in a tightly controlled indoor arena. This revealed that the beetles register directional information provided by the sun and the wind and can use them in a weighted manner. Moreover, the directional information can be transferred between these 2 sensory modalities, suggesting that they are combined in the spatial memory network in the beetle's brain. This flexible use of compass cue preferences relative to the prevailing visual and mechanosensory scenery provides a simple, yet effective, mechanism for enabling precise compass orientation at any time of the day.