Title: Octopus odor navigation - Extracting directional information from turbulent flow fields
Abstract: Odor navigation is a primordial behavior exhibited by many animals in which they use odor plumes to locate food, find mates, navigate to their home, or avoid predators. Odor navigation is particularly challenging when the olfactory signal is transported by turbulent air or water currents because turbulence breaks up the odor plume into sparse patches that the animal encounters very infrequently. It is therefore an astonishing feat of animal sensation that many animals are capable of locating an odor source by tracking weak and intermittent olfactory signals over distances that are very large compared to their body length.
In the first part of my talk, I will present our recent work on odor plume following by octopuses,
which is the first direct laboratory observations of octopuses performing this behavior. One of our main findings was that the circular suckers on the arms of the octopus appear to be the primary olfactory organs, which led me to think about how the octopus might process olfactory information, and the role of sensor geometry in olfactory sensing. In the second part of my talk, which is more speculative, I will discuss interesting questions arising from our work on octopuses. In particular, I will focus on the broader question of how animals, or robots, can extract spatial and directional information from turbulent flow fields.
Venkatesh Gopal is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics at Elmhurst University. Dr. Gopal has extensive experience—including postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northwestern University—in classical and quantum optics, quantum information processing, and neuroscience. His current research interests lie in understanding how biological systems process sensory information, with an emphasis on how possibly “optimal” movement strategies emerge to gather information efficiently. At Elmhurst, he is establishing a laboratory for the study of Biological Information Transduction and Sensing (BITS). An initial focus of this lab will be to use optical imaging to understand how some mammals and insects track odor plumes.
The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology Seminar Series aims to bring together a mix of mathematicians and biologists to foster discussion and collaboration between the two fields. The seminar series will take place on Fridays from 10am - 11am at the NITMB in the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago. There will be both an in-person and virtual component.
Tiffany Leighton
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