BrainLinks-BrainTools and bees?

The Centre welcomes a new member who brings a new species to navigation research.

A warm welcome to our new member Andrew Straw who is a Professor at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Freiburg, where he heads a lab focused on the neuroethology of vision and navigation.

Professor Straw is a biologist with a strong engineering background and specialize in the behavior and underlying mechanisms that insects use to see and navigate. During his career, he has pioneered several tracking technologies, including a multicopter drone capable of recording 3D trajectories of honey bees in the wild and low-latency virtual reality (VR) systems for freely moving animals. These tools allow his group to bridge the gap between natural behavior in the field and mechanistic studies in the lab.

Currently, his research aims to decode the neural circuits involved in navigation by combining behavioral data with computational modeling. In collaboration with other BrainLinks-BrainTools members, he also applies reinforcement learning frameworks to model how neural implementations lead to spatial representations.

Professor Straw contributes expertise in high-resolution animal tracking and genetic tools in Drosophila. In the longer term, he aims to explore the practical applications of his research in agriculture and biodiversity.

Just recently, his group made headlines! His group used a drone-based tracking system to provide the first high-resolution 3D flight paths of honey bees in natural landscapes. The results show that each bee navigates extremely precisely to the same destination over many flights and navigates more individually than previously known. The animals orient themselves using landmarks in the landscape.

“Our tracking system makes it possible for the first time to record high-resolution 3D flight paths of honey bees in natural landscapes,” explains Straw. “Our recordings show that each bee has its own preferred route and flies it very precisely. You could almost say that each bee has its own personality.”

Prof. Dr. Andrew Straw
Professor of Neurobiology and Behavioural Biology, University of Freiburg

Read the original press release of the university at https://uni-freiburg.de/en/honey-bees-navigate-more-precisely-than-previously-thought/

More about Straw’s work is available at: www.strawlab.org