The "whys" and "hows" of chemically-modulated flight behavior in insects.

The main focus of the research in my lab is animal behavior and how the nervous system generates and controls it. The specific behavior that I study is odor-guided navigation. Over the years most of my studies have focused on how male moths track invisible trails of attractant pheromone to females for mating. Recently we have begun to include studies on how both males and females track scents from night-blooming flowers to feed on their sugar rich nectar.

To better understand how this behavior is generated and controlled, we study it in the following different ways:

1. we want to observe the behavior and how experimental changes in the environment and the types of information available to the moths effect how they behave.
2. we want to make recordings from the moths muscles, nerves, and neurons to understand how the brain and nervous system organize and control the body to make the behavior that we observe.
3. we make computer simulation models of how we think the brain's control system uses information about all aspects of the environment to make the behavior we observe. If the computer simulated moths can find sources of attractive odors like the real moths then we might just understand a little bit of how moths really work.

For more information:

Odor-guided flight in moths.
Modeling approaches to odor-guided locomotion.
Normal and abnormal development of the antennal lobes in M. sexta.
Activity of flight muscles during free flight.