This sandwich placement will be based in the lab of Michael Winding.

Project summary

Foraging in groups can help animals locate and exploit food sources, but it also creates challenges. Individuals must decide when to follow others, when to forage alone, and how to use social information. These decisions also depend on resource availability and inter-animal competition. The neural circuits and computations underlying such behaviours and foraging decisions are poorly understood.

We have recently identified a new behaviour in fruit fly larvae, whereby larvae engage in head-to-head interactions that allow them to gather information about whether other larvae have recently encountered food. This provides a tractable system for asking how brains process social and food-related cues in foraging decisions. We previously generated the connectome of the larval brain [1], providing the full set of neural circuits that may underlie this behaviour. We have also linked many genetic tools to the connectome, which allow us to manipulate the activity of individual neurons/circuit elements to determine their role in behaviour [2].

For this project, we aim to determine which circuits control larval interactions, including potentially those processing social cues, conspecific recognition, and how these circuits interact with internal states such as hunger. This will involve connectomics analysis, targeted neuron-specific inactivation, and behavioural experiments using Raspberry Pi-based recording devices. This project offers the opportunity to link brain wiring, neural activity manipulation, and naturalistic social behaviour in a single experimentally tractable system.

Candidate background