Speaker
Description
Locusts offer a powerful model for studying social plasticity and collective behavior. Adapted to extreme environmental fluctuations and population density shifts, they can rapidly transition from a solitary, sedentary phase to the notorious swarm-forming gregarious one. Despite their significance as a model system and the severe humanitarian impact of locust swarms, the mechanisms underlying their behavioral plasticity and the initiation of swarming remain poorly understood.
In this talk, I will discuss our work investigating the sensory basis of these transitions, focusing on the sensory representation of conspecifics and the local interaction rules that drive coordinated swarm movement. Our findings indicate that crowding enhances olfactory sensitivity, with gregarious locusts showing increased sensitivity to food cues in the presence of social ones—an adaptation that likely facilitates food detection in swarms. When moving between feeding sites, gregarious locusts move in cohesive groups where visual cues from conspecifics are both necessary and sufficient for coordinated movement. In this context, we found that while both solitary and gregarious locusts respond to visual motion cues, only gregarious individuals actively pursue them, suggesting a shift in visual processing that promotes collective motion.
Building on these findings, we currently work to to further dissect the neural mechanisms mediating this transition, shedding light on how sensory processing reshapes behavior in different social contexts.
