CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS International Congress of Neuroethology

International Congress of Neuroethology CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS Contents Oral Abstracts ………………………….1 Monday……………………………………1 Tuesday……………………………………2 Wednesday……………………………17 Thursday…………………………………21 Friday………………………………………26 Poster Abstracts………………………39 This abstract book is sorted in program/session order. Search To search this digital document please click the button below. OPEN SEARCH Enter your search term in the box. You can search on a speaker’s name, title, keyword, author’s name or paper code. Clicking the search button will then list all successful matches for the search term. Clicking on any of the results in the list will take you immediately toe th appropriate page. Quick Skip To skip to a certain Session please use the bookmark function by clicking the button below. Once the bookmarks appear on the left hand side, simply click on the Session you wish to view. OPEN BOOKMARKS Oral Abstracts JCPA Presidential Symposium [PS2] As the craw flies and the beetle rolls: Straight-line orientation from behaviour to neurons Professor Marie Dacke1 1Lund Vision Group, Lund University, Sweden The seemingly simple act of walking in a straight line involves a complex interplay of various sensory modalities, the motor system, and cognition. This is obvious to anyone who have ever found themselves lost in the desert at night, or in a forest when the sun is high in the sky. A dung beetle released in the same unchartered territory does not move in circles, but holds a chosen bearing until it encounters a suitable spot to bury its ball of dung. The key to the beetle’s success lies in their ability to detect and orient via a large repertoire of celestial compass cues, from the bright sun to the weak intensity differences of light provided by the Milky Way. A beetle’s drive to adhere to its set course is so strong that it sticks to it regardless of the costs; over stones, through bushes and grass or in an experimental arena. However, if a beetle is forced to make a new ball, the bearing information is reset in its brain and a new course is set. This unique and robust orientation behaviour, in combination with an accessible brain, make the dung beetle an ideal model system for understanding the fundamental visual and neural processes underlying straight-line orientation. The presentation provides an overview of recent behavioural, anatomical and physiological results concerning how an insect brain is designed to facilitate straight- line orientation. [PS3] The widespread and long-term evolutionary consequences of human behaviour Dr George Perry1 The subsistence and habitat-modifying behaviors that typify how humans interact with our surrounding environments can have broad and temporally profound effects on natural ecosystems. In addition to ecosystem health and wildlife extinction risk, human behavior also influences the evolutionary biology of non-human species. Extensive human-driven behavioral and morphological phenotype evolution has been thoroughly documented for domesticated plants and animals, but these processes are in fact much more widespread, extending to non- domesticated species. Moreover, archaeological records suggest that similar processes extend considerably into prehistory, perhaps to 50,000 years before present or earlier. I will discuss the various processes by which human behavior can and has driven non-human evolutionary biology, including with examples from integrated phenotypic, evolutionary genomic, and ancient DNA research studies that are ongoing in my laboratory, and how these studies are also helping to reconstruct past human behavior by proxy. [PS4] Senses for three-dimensional orientation in C. elegans Professor Jon Pierce1 1Department of Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States C. elegans was chosen as a model by Sydney Brenner primarily for the promise of understanding whole-animal development and behavior at the level of identifiable cells and entire neuronal circuitry. At the time, Brenner, among others, lamented that the worm appeared relatively disadvantageous for behavioral complexity. By comparison, Drosophila boasts impressive behaviors including flight and vision. However, the complexity of worm behavior may be underestimated. By imagining how worms behave in their natural 3D environment of rotting vegetation rather than on the 2D surface of agar-filled Petri plates, we may discover that the worm is capable of complex behaviors. While burrowing vertically through compost, the worm would encounter an array of cues including gaseous, moisture, and geomagnetic that could guide it to a favored microenvironment. Adopting this mind frame, our lab has recently demonstrated that C. elegans performs a variety of sophisticated behaviors with implications for other animals. The worm orients to subtle humidity gradients, burrows using genes important for human muscular dystrophy, and directs burrowing by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field. By adopting the imagination of classical neuroethologists, C. elegans researchers will likely discover a rich repertoire of behaviors. [PS5] Molecular insights into the evolution of mosquito preference for human odor Assistant Professor Carolyn (Lindy) MCBride1 1Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Priceton University, United States 1 Researchers investigating the outbreak of an unknown illness along the coast of East Africa in 1952 discovered homes inhabited by a ‘domestic’ form of the mosquito Aedes aegypti. An ancestral ‘forest’ form of the same species was later found breeding in forests, just hundreds of meters away. Although closely related and fully interfertile in the laboratory, the two forms remained distinct in the wild and showed striking divergence in behavior: Domestic females specialized on biting humans, readily entering homes, flying toward human odor, and laying their eggs in water-storage containers indoors. Forest females avoided homes, preferred the odor of non- human animals, and laid their eggs in tree holes outdoors. These behavioral differences translated into marked divergence in capacity to spread human diseases, such as Chikungunya, the unknown illness from 1952, yellow fever, prevalent in Africa and South America since the 16th century, and dengue fever, currently causing sickness in over 300 million people around the world each year. This story illustrates how marked and complex behavioral differences can evolve between closely related populations in nature with profound implications for human health. In my laboratory, we are taking advantage of such evolution to uncover the genetic and neural basis of behaviors that adapt mosquitoes to human hosts. Using the mosquitoes described above as a model, we are working to identify the genetic changes that underlie the innate preference of domestic females for human odor and determine how these changes alter the activity and structure of olfactory circuits to generate distinct behavioral responses. Plenary Lecture 1 [PL1] Insights into the evolution of parental behavior from poisonous amphibians Professor Lauren O'connell1 1Stanford University, Stanford, United States Parental care is a key evolutionary innovation that facilitates the exploitation of novel habitats, influences fitness and survival of parents and offspring, and serves as an evolutionary precursor to the emergence of social behavior. Various parental care strategies have evolved in multiple taxa, yet the underlying mechanisms promoting the evolution of these behavioral phenotypes are poorly understood. Poison frogs show remarkable variation in parental care strategies including male- and female-uniparental care and biparental care. Importantly, paternal and maternal care occur with and without pair bonding in this clade, allowing disentanglement of parental care behaviors from pair-bonding. Parental care in poison frogs involves defense and hydration of embryos during development, and transportation of tadpoles by piggyback to pools of water. In species in which females care for offspring, mothers nourish growing tadpoles with trophic eggs until metamorphosis is complete. I will first discuss tadpole transport behavior that involves comparative work across three closely related species and has given us insights into general themes on parental care neural circuits across sexes and species. Specifically, we have found that the hypothalamus and hippocampus are critical in promoting parental care in frogs and have identified the neuromodulators that promote these behaviors in amphibians and other vertebrates. Second, I will zoom out to look at the convergent evolution of maternal care in two independent evolutionary origins of poison frogs in South America and Africa. In our focal species that diverged 150 million years ago, mothers provide trophic, unfertilized eggs to their developing tadpoles. Both species lace these eggs with neurotoxins, providing insight into how these energetically costly behaviors are maintained. Although we find convergence at the level of behavior, we have found that the molecular mechanisms underlying these behaviors are different. Finally, we will explore the parent-offspring interactions that facilitate this egg-feeding behavior by examining the neural basis of begging behavior in tadpoles. Tadpole begging behavior is an honest indicator of need where tadpoles must make life-or-death decisions about whether or not to beg in response to a visitor to their bromeliad, who may be their mother or a predator. Moreover, the tadpoles must tune these energetically

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