My name is Rickesh (Ricky) Patel. I’m a new postdoc in the Vision group working with Stanley Heinze on the neural basis of path integration, a vector navigation strategy, in bumblebees.
I completed my Ph.D. in Tom Cronin’s Lab at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (USA). During my dissertation, I worked with mantis shrimp, marine crustaceans that commonly inhabit burrows in their seafloor environments.
I investigated the navigational strategies these animals use to find their homes. By using a series of behavioral experiments that manipulated the positions of mantis shrimp in space and by altering potential sensory cues used for orientation, I showed that mantis shrimp use path integration reliant on the sun, celestial polarization patterns, and self-motion cues for orientation. I also found that mantis shrimp enacted stereotyped search patterns when path integration did not lead them directly home.
Finally, by comparing foraging paths in the presence and absence of a movable landmark placed near the burrow, I showed that mantis shrimp navigate using landmarks in parallel with their path integration system. My work uncovered the robust navigational toolkit mantis shrimp rely upon to find their homes while underwater.
I am looking forward to working with Stanley, his lab, and the rest of the Vision group at LU to investigate path integration behavior in bumblebees and how this impressive behavior is neurally mediated in the tiny central brains of these animals.
In the future, I hope to apply what I learn with bumblebees to comparatively investigate how mantis shrimp brains encode navigation behaviors similar to those of many insects, all while in an aquatic environment.
