Honeybees to Drones! Interview with Mark Roper on visual detectors for navigation!!

You must have all experienced a honeybee buzz around you, avoiding all your attempts at hitting it. These tiny animals are amazing at navigation. They move around like superman finding little flowers with ease. What makes them so good at navigation?

Mark and colleagues wanted to understand the amazing navigation capabilities of honeybees and generate a model of it. One would imagine that the system would be highly complex, with tons of interactions. But they show that the system can not only be modeled on a very few components, but it has a simplistic architecture. This generates a small and efficient system, which can be useful for helping us generate better navigation algorithm for daily life. As an instance, drones require large amounts of battery power for flying, which restricts the distance they can travel. But using honeybees based navigation system can allow them to be lighter and less power consuming, allowing them to fly much longer distances. Please listen to Mark to know more.



To know more, please refer to:
Insect Bio-inspired Neural Network Provides New Evidence on How Simple Feature Detectors Can Enable Complex Visual Generalization and Stimulus Location Invariance in the Miniature Brain of Honeybees
Roper et al., PLoS Computational Biology, 2017

Fangs or Venom, what came first? Interview with Nicholas Casewell on evolution of venom in Blenny Fishes!

Most of us get scared at the sight of a snake. It is the fear of a poisonous bite that scares us. Even if the snake is not poisonous, it scares us! So, just looking like something that is deadly, is enough to scare potential predators. Mimicking deadly venomous animals can be a good evolutionary strategy. For example, in the following video the animal looks like a snake, but is actually a caterpillar!!

Nicholas and colleagues use blenny fish to understand the evolution of venom and fangs, the apparatus for providing the venom. They find that one specie of blenny fish contains venom, but multiple other species of blenny fish only contain fangs, but not the venom! It seems the species only containing the fang, but not the poison, are mimicking the poisonous specie and taking advantage of the threat of the deadly venom. Just having the fangs without the poison provides advantages, without actually putting energy into generating the poison. To know more, please listen to Nick.


To know more, please refer to :
The Evolution of Fangs, Venom, and Mimicry Systems in Blenny Fishes
Casewell, Visser, Baumann, Dobson, Han et al., Current Biology, 2017