Abstract

Our understanding of insect navigation is limited by difficulty in studying their neurobiology and behavior in detail. What do they do? Where do they go? What patterns of neural activity are present? For technical reasons, these questions are hard to answer, but doing so will help address problems like biodiversity loss and engineering of high performance, robust, and sustainable robots. Here I present our own and others’ work to develop low-latency tracking systems that automatically steer cameras to record high-speed, high-resolution videos of behaving animals. Furthermore, by using genetically encoded calcium indicators and fluorescence microscopes, such systems also enable recording of neural activity in freely walking Drosophila. By  moving the camera to follow the subject, these systems reduce problems like motion blur and the tradeoff of high resolution versus wide field of view. In the future, these technologies will allow performing new types of experiments to gain mechanistic insights into insect navigation and, ultimately, will improve our understanding of the behavioral and physiological basis of the ecology of these important organisms.