Odour motion sensing enhances navigation of complex plumes.

Odour 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 odour signal, including odour identity, intensity and timing. Effective navigation requires balancing these multiple streams of olfactory information and integrating them with other sensory inputs, including mechanosensory and visual cues.

Spatiotemporally precise optogenetic activation of sensory neurons in freely walking .

Previous work has characterized how walking coordinate the movements of individual limbs (DeAngelis et al., 2019). To understand the circuit basis of this coordination, one must characterize how sensory feedback from each limb affects walking behavior.

The manifold structure of limb coordination in walking .

Terrestrial locomotion requires animals to coordinate their limb movements to efficiently traverse their environment. While previous studies in hexapods have reported that limb coordination patterns can vary substantially, the structure of this variability is not yet well understood. Here, we characterized the symmetric and asymmetric components of variation in walking kinematics in the genetic model organism .