Airflow and optic flow mediates antennal positioning in flying honeybees

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Abstract

To maintain their speeds during navigation, insects rely on feedback from their visual and mechanosensory modalities. Although optic flow plays an essential role in speed determination, it is less reliable under conditions of low light or sparse landmarks. Under such conditions, insects rely on feedback from antennal mechanosensors but it is not clear how these inputs combine to elicit flight-related antennal behaviours. We here show that antennal movements of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, are governed by combined visual and antennal mechanosensory inputs. Frontal airflow, as experienced during forward flight, causes antennae to actively move forward as a sigmoidal function of absolute airspeed values. However, corresponding front-to-back optic-flow causes antennae to move backward, as a linear function of relative optic flow, opposite the airspeed response. When combined, these inputs maintain antennal position in a state of dynamic equilibrium.

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Taruni Roy Khurana

National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Sanjay P Sane

National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India

For correspondence
sane@ncbs.res.in

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: Study involved experiments on honeybees and were conducted according to ethical guidelines.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.