@article {CaltechAUTHORS_https://authors.library.caltech.edu/id/eprint/103891, title ="The long-distance flight behavior of Drosophila suggests a general model for wind-assisted dispersal in insects", author = "Leitch, Katherine and Ponce, Francesca", month = "June", year = "2020", url = "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20200612-145242003", note = "The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. \n\nPosted June 11, 2020. \n\nWe wish to thank Massimo Vergassola (UC San Diego), who was principal investigator on a grant from the Simons Foundation (71582123) that funded the initial stages of this project. This work was also supported by the NSF (IOS 1547918). Román Corfas, Ainul Huda, Alysha de Souza, Johan Melis, and Aubrey Goldsmith participated in data collection. Annie Rak contributed to preliminary modeling efforts. Bob Verish provided guidance for safely accessing Coyote Lake, and the Barstow Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management permitted our use of this field site.", revision_no = "9", abstract = "Despite the ecological importance of long-distance dispersal in insects, its underlying mechanistic basis is poorly understood. One critical question is how insects interact with the wind to increase their travel distance as they disperse. To gain insight into dispersal using a species amenable to further investigation using genetic tools, we conducted release-and-recapture experiments in the Mojave Desert using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. We deployed chemically-baited traps in a 1 km-radius ring around the release site, equipped with machine vision systems that captured the arrival times of flies as they landed. In each experiment, we released between 30,000 and 200,000 flies. By repeating the experiments under a variety of conditions, we were able to quantify the influence of wind on flies' dispersal behavior. Our results confirm that even tiny fruit flies could disperse ~15 km in a single flight in still air, and might travel many times that distance in a moderate wind. The dispersal behavior of the flies is well explained by a model in which animals maintain a fixed body orientation relative to celestial cues, actively regulate groundspeed along their body axis, and allow the wind to advect them sideways. The model accounts for the observation that flies actively fan out in all directions in still air, but are increasingly advected downwind as winds intensify. In contrast, our field data do not support a Lévy flight model of dispersal, despite the fact that our experimental conditions almost perfectly match the core assumptions of that theory.", } @article {CaltechAUTHORS_https://authors.library.caltech.edu/id/eprint/90237, title ="A Systematic Nomenclature for the Drosophila Ventral Nervous System", author = "Court, Robert and Armstrong, Douglas", month = "April", year = "2017", url = "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20181010-145553319", note = "The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license. \n\nbioRxiv preprint first posted online Apr. 26, 2017. \n\nWe thank Gerald M. Rubin and the staff of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus for hosting our workshop. Special thanks to Wyatt Korff and the other members of the organising committee for such a successful workshop.\nThis work was initially supported in part by grants EP/F500385/1 and BB/F529254/1 for the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics Doctoral Training Centre in Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience (http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/dtc) from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and the UK Medical Research Council (MRC). Finally by the Welcome Trust as part of the ’Virtual Fly Brain: a global informatics hub for Drosophila neurobiology’ WT105023MA.", revision_no = "14", abstract = "Insect nervous systems are proven and powerful model systems for neuroscience research with wide relevance in biology and medicine. However, descriptions of insect brains have suffered from a lack of a complete and uniform nomenclature. Recognising this problem the Insect Brain Name Working Group produced the first agreed hierarchical nomenclature system for the adult insect brain, using Drosophila melanogaster as the reference framework, with other insect taxa considered to ensure greater consistency and expandability (Ito et al., 2014). Ito et al. (2014) purposely focused on the gnathal regions that account for approximately 50% of the adult CNS. We extend this nomenclature system to the sub-gnathal regions of the adult Drosophila nervous system to provide a nomenclature of the so-called ventral nervous system (VNS), which includes the thoracic and abdominal neuromeres that was not included in the original work and contains the neurons that play critical roles underpinning most fly behaviours.", }