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First published online July 14, 2008
Journal of Experimental Biology 211, 2478-2485 (2008)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2008
doi: 10.1242/jeb.018879

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Context-dependent olfactory enhancement of optomotor flight control in Drosophila

Dawnis M. Chow^* and Mark A. Frye

Department of Physiological Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA

^* Author for correspondence (e-mail: dmchow{at}ucla.edu)

Accepted 28 May 2008

Sensing and following the chemical plume of food odors is a fundamental challenge faced by many organisms. For flying insects, the task is complicated by wind that distorts the plume and buffets the fly. To maintain an upwind heading, and thus stabilize their orientation in a plume, insects such as flies and moths make use of strong context-specific visual equilibrium reflexes. For example, flying straight requires the regulation of image rotation across the eye, whereas minimizing side-slip and avoiding a collision require regulation of image expansion. In flies, visual rotation stabilizes plume tracking, but rotation and expansion optomotor responses are controlled by separate visual pathways. Are olfactory signals integrated with optomotor responses in a manner dependent upon visual context? We addressed this question by investigating the effect of an attractive food odor on active optomotor flight control. Odorant caused flies both to increase aerodynamic power output and to steer straighter. However, when challenged with wide-field optic flow, odor resulted in enhanced amplitude rotation responses but reduced amplitude expansion responses. For both visual conditions, flies tracked motion signals more closely in odor, an indication of increased saliency. These results suggest a simple search algorithm by which olfactory signals improve the salience of visual stimuli and modify optomotor control in a context-dependent manner, thereby enabling an animal to fly straight up a plume and approach odiferous objects.

Key words: olfaction, vision, motor control, multisensory, integration, sensory function

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