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SUMMARY:BMI Special Seminar // Andrew Gordus - Untangling the web of behav
 iors used in spider orb-weaving
DTSTART:20230706T110000
DTEND:20230706T120000
DTSTAMP:20260429T233408Z
UID:b4bcf76acfbc7e803d6994f6fb2ed446b124d996fb7160854ac09148
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Andrew Gordus\, Johns Hopkins University\, Baltimore\, USA\nMa
 ny innate behaviors are the result of several coordinated sensorimotor pro
 grams to produce higher-order behaviors. Knowing the underlying cognitive 
 states that encode how these programs are coordinated is often difficult s
 ince we simply can’t ask the animal their objective. However\, extended 
 phenotypes such as architecture provide us with a window into the mind bec
 ause the structure itself is a physical record of behavioral intent. A par
 ticularly elegant and easily quantifiable structure is the spider orb-web.
  We have developed a novel assay enabling high-resolution behavioral quant
 ification of web-building by the hackled orb-weaver Uloborus diversus. Wit
 h a brain the size of a fly’s\, the spider U. diversus offers a tractabl
 e organism for the study of complex behaviors. Using machine vision algori
 thms for limb tracking\, and unsupervised behavioral clustering methods\, 
 we have developed an atlas of stereotyped movements used in orb-web constr
 uction. The rules for how these movements are coordinated change during di
 fferent phases of web construction\, and we find that we can predict web-b
 uilding stages based on these rules alone. Thus\, the physical structures 
 of the web explicitly represent distinct phases of behavior. To uncover ho
 w this sophisticated algorithm is encoded in the brain\, we have assembled
  a genome\, and developed biological assays to understand which neurons an
 d genes are critical to encoding web-building behavior.\n 
LOCATION:SV 2510 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%202510
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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