What is it about?
Insects have a spatial navigation compass in their brain to help them maintain a constant heading, sometimes over vast distances. The heading compass uses information from multiple senses such as sight, smell, wind, as well as celestial signals like skylight polarization and the position of the sun or moon. However, on their trip, these animals must also track faint wisps of odor to find food or mates. We found that visual input to the compass provides a fly with a memory trace of its steering direction so that a turn out of a plume can be reversed back into it.
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Why is it important?
Insect foragers are crucial members of many ecosystems. The neural heading compass of the insect brain is highly conserved across taxa. In principle, any flying insect would benefit from engaging the visual navigation system to successfully track an airborne chemical plume.
Perspectives
This study was deeply satisfying because it resolved a longstanding question in our field - why is vision used to track odor? Others' discovery of how the neural compass works provided us with the eureka moment to answer our question.
Mark Frye
University of California Los Angeles
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Odor tracking in flying
Drosophila
requires visual reafference and compass neurons, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2609141123.
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