Hosts: Josie Clowney (MCDB) & Swathi Yadlapalli (Cell & Developmental Biology)

Many behaviors such as communication, navigation, and mating, require the coordination of many sub-behaviors over multiple timescales. A particularly remarkable animal behavior is shelter construction. This behavior requires external and internal cues to trigger and coordinate behaviors over multiple timescales to effectively construct something that may take hours to build. An excellent example of this is spider orb-weaving. It involves coordinating many sub-behaviors to successfully construct the web. In essence, the structure of the web is a record of the underlying behavioral structure. It is a stereotyped, but not necessarily reflexive, behavior that requires multiple decisions be made based on a variety of external and internal cues. The goal of our research is to objectively define this behavior at a high spatiotemporal resolution, and then investigate the neuronal and genetic factors that influence how this behavior is encoded in the brain.