Abstract
Olfactory systems in animals play a major role in finding food and mates, avoiding predators, and communication. Chemical tracking in odorant plumes has typically been considered a spatial information problem where individuals navigate towards higher concentration. Recent research involving chemosensory neurons in the spiny lobster, Panulirus argus, show they possess rhythmically active or ‘bursting’ olfactory receptor neurons that respond to the intermittency in the odor signal. This suggests a possible, previously unexplored olfactory search strategy that enables lobsters to utilize the temporal variability within a turbulent plume to track the source. This study utilized computational fluid dynamics to simulate the turbulent dispersal of odorants and assess a number of search strategies thought to aid lobsters. These strategies include quantification of concentration magnitude using chemosensory antennules and leg chemosensors, simultaneous sampling of water velocities using antennule mechanosensors, and utilization of antennules to quantify intermittency of the odorant plume. Results show that lobsters can utilize intermittency in the odorant signal to track an odorant plume faster and with greater success in finding the source than utilizing concentration alone. However, the additional use of lobster leg chemosensors reduced search time compared to both antennule intermittency and concentration strategies alone by providing spatially separated odorant sensors along the body.
Highlights
Smell and search are key components of animal behaviors including migration, mate detection, predator avoidance, and food acquisition [1,2,3,4]
The concentration search algorithm was successful in tracking the odor plume in of trials with antrials average time 105 s ± time
Olfactory search is of near universal importance throughout the animal kingdom, but much work is still needed to understand the strategies animals use
Summary
Smell and search are key components of animal behaviors including migration, mate detection, predator avoidance, and food acquisition [1,2,3,4]. Olfaction is a primary sensory modality for many organisms, how information is perceived from the environment, the importance of different sensory information, and how organisms integrate this information from different modalities is still an active area of research [5,6,7]. Understanding olfaction has additional applied utility, as animal strategies in tracking odor can be adapted into human engineering of autonomous underwater search vehicles [8]. Our engineering knowledge is still insufficient to develop sensors and algorithms that enable man-made systems to predict, navigate and utilize turbulent odorant plumes to locate sources of chemical release at the speed and accuracy of many organisms. The majority of olfactory search models are adapted to well mixed and diffusive regimes or lack turbulence in their transport equation, and do not accurately represent the intermittent nature of chemical plumes [9,10].
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