Heading choices of flyingDrosophilaunder changing angles of polarized light

Abstract

2 Summary Many navigating insects include the celestial polarization pattern as an additional visual cue to orient their travels. Spontaneous orientation responses of both walking and flying fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to linearly polarized light have previously been demonstrated. Using newly designed modular flight arenas consisting entirely of off-theshelf parts and 3D-printed components we present individual flying flies with a slow and continuous rotational change in the incident angle of linear polarization. Under such openloop conditions, single flies choose arbitrary headings with respect to the angle of polarized light and show a clear tendency to maintain those chosen headings for several minutes, thereby adjusting their course to the slow rotation of the incident stimulus. Importantly, flies show the tendency to maintain a chosen heading even when two individual test periods under a linearly polarized stimulus are interrupted by an epoch of unpolarized light lasting several minutes. Finally, we show that these behavioral responses are wavelength-specific, existing under polarized UV stimulus while being absent under polarized green light. Taken together, these findings provide further evidence supporting Drosophila's abilities to use celestial cues for visually guided navigation and course correction.

A neural circuit architecture for rapid behavioral flexibility in goal-directed navigation

“…Flies, like many other insects, display individual heading preferences, maintaining a specific 'goal heading' for periods of time (SI Fig S3) [28,31,43], a behavior that is thought to aid dispersal and long-range navigation [44][45][46][47][48][49]. However, rather than purely fixating on one goal heading, both walking and flying flies also explore other headings while centering their explorations around the goal heading [28,31,43,[50][51][52], a behavioral pattern that matches our observations in this paradigm. These results led us to compare two alternative hypotheses: one in which flies' actions were linked directly to specific visual patterns, as has been suggested to explain fly behavior in this paradigm (see, for example, [53]), and one in which flies' actions were linked to an internal goal heading.…”

Autophagy-dependent filopodial kinetics restrict synaptic partner choice during Drosophila brain wiring

“…Visual attention is a higher-order behavior that requires functional basic vision. We therefore next tested basic motion vision using an optomotor assay with tethered, flying flies in a virtual flight arena 36,37 . Loss of autophagy in photoreceptors did not significantly affect the ability of flies to follow counter-clockwise and clockwise motion (see Methods; Supplementary Fig.…”

A connectome of theDrosophilacentral complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection

“…Particularly when navigating over long distances, skylight cues allow the head direction representation to be tethered to global landmarks such as the sun, and to the polarized light patterns of the sky (Heinze and Reppert, 2011). Indeed, polarized light e-vector information has long been thought to be important for the determination of sky-compass-based head direction in many insects, and that is the case in the fly as well (Hardcastle et al, 2020;Mathejczyk and . CC-BY 4.0 International license available under a (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.…”

“…The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted December 9, 2020. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.08.413955 doi: bioRxiv preprint Wernet, 2019;Warren et al, 2018;Weir and Dickinson, 2012;Wernet et al, 2012), despite their comparatively small dorsal rim area (Fortini and Rubin, 1991;Wada, 1974;Wernet et al, 2003)-a dorsal band of the insect eye that is structurally specialized for the detection of polarized light e-vectors in the sky (Labhart, 1999). Sensory information about the celestial polarization pattern reaches the Drosophila CX via a dedicated pathway ( (Hardcastle et al, 2020;Weir et al, 2016), Figures 6-8); although only 5 ER4m neurons from each hemisphere showing strong tuning to e-vector orientation, this tuning collectively covers a large part of the 180 degree range of possible e-vector orientations (Hardcastle et al, 2020;Weir et al, 2016).…”