The neural basis of locust plasticity and swarming

• Applicant: Einat Couzin-Fuchs, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Sensory and Behavioural Biology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 570979749

The ability to adapt to changing social environments is fundamental to life. Locusts’ pronounced adaptation to both solitary and gregarious lifestyles, as well as the rapid transition between the two, offers an excellent model for studying social plasticity and the emergence of collective behavior. Despite their potential as a model system and the significant humanitarian impact of locust swarms, the mechanisms underlying locust plasticity remain poorly understood. Leveraging expertise in quantitative behavior and neurophysiology, I propose a high-resolution characterization of gregarious and solitarious behavior in naturalistic social contexts—an approach previously applied only to individual locusts—laying the groundwork for elucidating the processes mediating transitions between these states. Our recent findings of phenotypic differences in olfactory processing provide an opportunity to dissect how these differences affect neural processing and behavior in an accessible sensory system. We will further develop this work to investigate how uni- and multimodal experiences of crowding drive the transition to swarming. The proposed project employs an integrative approach that combines detailed behavior analysis, virtual-reality (VR) experiments, and neurophysiology for an in-depth study of the sensory basis of locust plasticity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants