We're very excited to start the new year with two summer scholarship students (Lana Sobieralski and Annabel Moran) and a new post doc (Katja Sporar Klinge). However, sadly for us, but great for him, Raymond is leaving as he has found his dream job outside of academia.
By Karin
We're very excited to start the new year with two summer scholarship students (Lana Sobieralski and Annabel Moran) and a new post doc (Katja Sporar Klinge). However, sadly for us, but great for him, Raymond is leaving as he has found his dream job outside of academia.
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By Karin
We just found out that Sarah's amazing types paper will receive the 2022 Readers Choice Award for original research paper. Super cool! By Yuri,
If you keep your brain working over three nights and get up with only silly ideas each morning, just set a meeting with someone. Circular data especially trick us not to stop thinking but get any ideal solutions. In a meeting with Richard, he suggested a straightforward Matlab function that solved our problems at once. That's how we should work on 'complicated' calculations, which turned out not really in the end. By Karin
Last night, late in Australia, I gave a talk as part of the World Wide Neuro initiative. You can find the link here. By Yuri
My friends Primoz Pirih and Gregor Belušič sent me an article about Dr Dora Ilse. Please read it via this link. Dr Dora Ilse demonstrates that butterflies have a sense of colour, and that most of them discover flowers on their first approach through their colour and scent. She published her doctoral thesis in 1928. I am amazed by her passion and detailed experiments, which we still use today, as well as her artistic talent; see her drawings in figures! It is a true shame that her works are underappreciated. I wish I could know her career in the '60s and '70s, which has disappeared. By Raymond
Most software requires input from the user, in the case of the Tethered Flight Arena this user is both the researcher and the tethered animal. Whilst the researcher can interact with the software in a traditional way (mouse and keyboard) a unique solution is required to allow for the tethered animal to interact with the system. In order to understand what the tethered animal wants to do we use a markerless pose estimation software called DeepLabCut-live to track both of its wings. The 4 points shown in the figures below are used to track 2 positions on each wing, from these positions it is possible to calculate the wing beat amplitude within a range of 0 to 180 degrees for each wing. Currently, DeepLabCut-live can update these markers more than 165 times a second and send that information into the Unity game engine. Within Unity the wing beat amplitudes are calculated and used to update the tethered animal's heading within the virtual scene. DeepLabCut - Website Link By Sarah
When I joined the lab in 2017, this was the project I was originally employed to work on. Almost 4 years, and several other publications later, this work is finally complete and the publication has been released on the PNAS website (link here - Facilitation of neural responses to targets moving against optic flow). by Sarah
I am often asked how we tell male and female hoverflies apart. It’s all in the eyes, as the above picture shows, there are very obvious differences between the eyes of male (♂) and female (♀) Eristalis tenax. The eyes of the male meet in the middle while the eyes of the female are clearly separated. This sexual dimorphism is not just limited to the obvious outward appearance, the fronto-dorsal region of the male eye contains a ‘bright zone’ with large facets and increased light capture. This male specific region of the eye is thought to be important for detecting and chasing females. Indeed, this bright zone seems to contribute to the enhanced contrast sensitivity and speed motion detector responses of neurons in the male hoverfly brain compared to the female (Straw et al, J Exp Biol, 2006). What is yet to be studied is how these changes affect the responses of neurons further downstream and ultimately control behavioral responses. Lily Mikajlo, who has recently joined our lab as part of her third-year Medical Science placement topic, is hoping to provide further insight. She will be comparing the response properties of optic flow sensitive descending neurons in both male and female hoverflies. |
Hoverfly Vision
The hoverfly vision group can be found at 2 locations: At Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and at Uppsala University in Sweden. Archives
January 2022
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