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Abstract
Animal behaviours are demonstrably governed by sensory stimulation, previous experience and internal states like hunger. With increasing hunger, priorities shift towards foraging and feeding. During foraging, flies are known to employ efficient path integration strategies. However, general long-term activity patterns for both hungry and satiated flies in conditions of foraging remain to be better understood. Similarly, little is known about how permanent contact chemosensory stimulation affects locomotion. To address these questions, we have developed a novel, simplistic fly activity tracking setup—the Panopticon. Using a 3D-printed Petri dish inset, our assay allows recording of walking behaviour, of several flies in parallel, with all arena surfaces covered by a uniform substrate layer. We tested two constellations of providing food: (i) in single patches and (ii) omnipresent within the substrate layer. Fly tracking is done with FIJI, further assessment, analysis and presentation is done with a custom-built MATLAB analysis framework. We find that starvation history leads to a long-lasting reduction in locomotion, as well as a delayed place preference for food patches which seems to be not driven by immediate hunger motivation.
Highlights
IntroductionFlies show hunger-motivated ranging or foraging walks to find food; they show explorative walks (or local searching behaviour) after food encounter (Dethier, 1957; Bell et al, 1985; Bell, 1990; Corrales-Carvajal et al, 2016; Kim and Dickinson, 2017; Murata et al, 2017; Hughson et al, 2018; Mahishi and Huetteroth, 2019), and much has been achieved in identifying the circuits and dynamics involved in this behaviour (Corfas et al, 2019; Lin et al, 2019; Moreira et al, 2019; Sayin et al, 2019; Seidenbecher et al, 2020; Behbahani et al, 2021)
We find that starvation history leads to a long-lasting reduction in locomotion, as well as a delayed place preference for food patches which seems to be not driven by immediate hunger motivation
The Panopticon represents a cost-effective, Petri dish-based locomotion assay which we utilise in two configurations: (i) a classical foraging assay with a single food patch and (ii) an omnipresent food configuration, where every surface in the arena is uniformly covered by substrate
Summary
Flies show hunger-motivated ranging or foraging walks to find food; they show explorative walks (or local searching behaviour) after food encounter (Dethier, 1957; Bell et al, 1985; Bell, 1990; Corrales-Carvajal et al, 2016; Kim and Dickinson, 2017; Murata et al, 2017; Hughson et al, 2018; Mahishi and Huetteroth, 2019), and much has been achieved in identifying the circuits and dynamics involved in this behaviour (Corfas et al, 2019; Lin et al, 2019; Moreira et al, 2019; Sayin et al, 2019; Seidenbecher et al, 2020; Behbahani et al, 2021) Most of these studies either used hunger-motivated behaviour to focus on the underlying navigational strategy of the flies, or they focussed on exploration–exploitation trade-offs under different motivational settings. How much does a fly explore when nutritional homeostasis can be achieved anywhere?
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