From odor coding to decision making in cockroach groups

• Applicant: Einat Couzin-Fuchs, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Sensory and Behavioural Biology ; Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465310243

A central challenge in the study of social species is to understand how individual decisions both shape, and are shaped by, the social context in which they occur. We propose to investigate this relationship across neural, individual, and collective scales using shelter selection behavior in cockroaches. Collective sheltering in cockroaches demonstrates a clear interplay between the benefit of aggregation and the cost of competition, and provides an example of where collective decisions largely differ from those reached by individual animals alone. In a recent study, we monitored sheltering behavior with respect to the sensory representation of a food odor (vanillin), that was found to be attractive to individual cockroaches but avoided by groups. We discovered that a similar change in preference occurs also in the presence of a social odor (an extract of the colony feces) alone, and that the neural representation of the two odorants (vanillin and feces) overlap in the antennal lobe, the first olfactory processing center. The possibility of replicating a ‘social’ behavior by utilizing a social odor provides a unique opportunity to study the integration of social and food cues within a single sensory center, and to build an understanding of the fundamental building blocks that underlie social decision-making. To understand the relations between early odor coding and valence (objective 1,2 and 3), and the relationship between individual and population-level decisions-making (objective 1 and 4), we will systematically study individual and collective sheltering choices in relation to the shelters’ perceived values. We will address the open questions of how food and social odor cues of different quality and quantity influence shelter decisions, to what extent decisions relate to a shelter’s olfactory representation, how the olfactory representations are being computed and, consequently, how individual choices translate to population level decisions. In addition, we will evaluate the ecological implications of such inversions of preference in a social context for this specific system, and for group-living species more generally.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants