The neuro-ecology of resource localization in Drosophila: behavioral components of perception and search

From the moment an adult fruit fly ecloses, its primary objective in life is to disperse and locate the source of an attractive food odor upon which to feed and reproduce. The evolution of flight has greatly enhanced the success of fruit flies specifically and insects more generally. Control of flight by Drosophila melanogaster is unequivocally visual. Strong optomotor reflexes towards translatory and rotational visual flow stabilize forward flight trajectory, altitude and speed. The steering responses to translatory and rotational flow in particular are mediated by computationally separate neural circuits in the fly's visual system, and gaze-stabilizing body saccades are elicited by threshold integration of expanding visual flow. However, visual information is not alone sufficient to enable a fruit fly to recognize and locate an appropriately smelly object due in part to the relatively poor resolution of its compound eyes. Rather, the animal uses an acute sense of smell to actively track odors during flight. Without a finely adapted olfactory system, the fly's remarkable visual capabilities are for naught. The relative importance of vision is apparent in the cross-modal fusion of the two modalities for stable active odor tracking. Olfactory processing in Drosophila is shaped by ecological and functional forces which are inextricably linked. Thus physiologists seeking the functional determinants of olfactory coding as well as ecologists seeking to understand the mechanisms of speciation do well to consider each others' point of view. Here we synthesize a broad perspective that integrates across ultimate and proximate mechanisms of odor tracking in Drosophila.