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The familiar scent of home, the enticing aroma of food, and the distressing smell of decay or an encroaching predator are just a few examples of the complex chemical landscape that organisms, including ourselves, must navigate each day. Across the phylogenetic tree, from unicellular life to insects to both aquatic and terrestrial vertebrates, the ability to reliably sense and move through one’s chemical environment is crucial for adaptive behavior and survival. At the same time, the relationship between the chemical senses and the environment is complicated by the seemingly ephemeral and fluctuating nature of chemical signals, which poses a distinctive set of challenges (Barwich, 2016, 2018). To make matters more difficult, fluctuations in the sensory signal do not always arise from the environment alone, but can also be generated by the organisms themselves through a behavior often referred to as sniffing.What is a sniff, and how general is this behavior? Across vertebrates, invertebrates, and aquatic species, organisms transiently modulate their bodies or physiology to intensify chemosensory sampling (Atema, 1988; Crimaldi et al., 2022; Dethier, 1987). In this broad sense, a sniff is a brief increase in fluid flow across an olfactory organ, produced either by actively driving air or water or by moving the sensory organ through the surrounding medium (Koehl, 2006). Terrestrial vertebrates increase the frequency, depth, and amplitude of respiration (Tomenzoli, 2005; Wachowiak, 2011); insects generate flow through wing fanning and antennal motion (Koehl, 2006; Loudon & Koehl, 2000); crustaceans flick their antennules to pull water into aesthetasc arrays (Catania, 2006; Waldrop & Koehl, 2016); snakes flick their tongues (Schwenk, 1995); and fish use cough-like jaw movements (Nevitt, 1991). Despite this morphological diversity, the functional motif is the same: a temporally bounded sampling bout generated by coordinated motor or physiological action. This has led some to argue that olfactory navigation provides a useful model system for investigating active perception (Wachowiak, 2011), since modulation of motor variables such as sniff speed, frequency, and depth can profoundly shape the temporal dynamics of odorant concentrations, which in turn affects odor perception (Laing, 1983; Tomenzoli, 2005). Read more here
The code that produces these simulations is publicly available at the following Github repository: see here.
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