Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass.

Autor:	Dacke M; Department of Biology, Lund Vision Group, Lund University, 223 62 Lund, Sweden.; School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witswatersrand, Wits 2050, South Africa., Bell ATA; Department of Biology, Lund Vision Group, Lund University, 223 62 Lund, Sweden., Foster JJ; Department of Biology, Lund Vision Group, Lund University, 223 62 Lund, Sweden., Baird EJ; Department of Biology, Division of Functional Morphology, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm Sweden., Strube-Bloss MF; Biocenter, Zoology II, University of Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany., Byrne MJ; School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witswatersrand, Wits 2050, South Africa., El Jundi B; Biocenter, Zoology II, University of Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany basil.el-jundi@uni-wuerzburg.de.
Jazyk:	angličtina
Zdroj:	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A] 2019 Jul 09; Vol. 116 (28), pp. 14248-14253. Date of Electronic Publication: 2019 Jun 24.
DOI:	10.1073/pnas.1904308116
Abstrakt:	South African ball-rolling dung beetles exhibit a unique orientation behavior to avoid competition for food: after forming a piece of dung into a ball, they efficiently escape with it from the dung pile along a straight-line path. To keep track of their heading, these animals use celestial cues, such as the sun, as an orientation reference. Here we show that wind can also be used as a guiding cue for the ball-rolling beetles. We demonstrate that this mechanosensory compass cue is only used when skylight cues are difficult to read, i.e., when the sun is close to the zenith. This raises the question of how the beetles combine multimodal orientation input to obtain a robust heading estimate. To study this, we performed behavioral experiments in a tightly controlled indoor arena. This revealed that the beetles register directional information provided by the sun and the wind and can use them in a weighted manner. Moreover, the directional information can be transferred between these 2 sensory modalities, suggesting that they are combined in the spatial memory network in the beetle's brain. This flexible use of compass cue preferences relative to the prevailing visual and mechanosensory scenery provides a simple, yet effective, mechanism for enabling precise compass orientation at any time of the day. Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Databáze:	MEDLINE
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