Inversion of pheromone preference optimizes foraging in C. elegans
Name
elife-58144-v1.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.5 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
dbd7d8a24559df5f1129e8be416e1adc
Author(s)
Dal Bello, Martina
Pérez-Escudero, Alfonso
Schroeder, Frank C
Gore, Jeff
Date Issued
2021
Journal
eLife
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Citation
Dal Bello, Martina, Pérez-Escudero, Alfonso, Schroeder, Frank C and Gore, Jeff. 2021. "Inversion of pheromone preference optimizes foraging in C. elegans." eLife, 10.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Foraging animals have to locate food sources that are usually patchily distributed and subject to competition. Deciding when to leave a food patch is challenging and requires the animal to integrate information about food availability with cues signaling the presence of other individuals (e.g., pheromones). To study how social information transmitted via pheromones can aid foraging decisions, we investigated the behavioral responses of the model animal Caenorhabditis elegans to food depletion and pheromone accumulation in food patches. We experimentally show that animals consuming a food patch leave it at different times and that the leaving time affects the animal preference for its pheromones. In particular, worms leaving early are attracted to their pheromones, while worms leaving later are repelled by them. We further demonstrate that the inversion from attraction to repulsion depends on associative learning and, by implementing a simple model, we highlight that it is an adaptive solution to optimize food intake during foraging.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7554/ELIFE.58144
