Sparse and stereotyped encoding implicates a core glomerulus for ant alarm behavior.

Abstract

Ants communicate via large arrays of pheromones and possess expanded, highly complex olfactory systems, with antennal lobes in the brain comprising up to ∼500 glomeruli. This expansion implies that odors could activate hundreds of glomeruli, which would pose challenges for higher-order processing. To study this problem, we generated transgenic ants expressing the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP in olfactory sensory neurons. Using two-photon imaging, we mapped complete glomerular responses to four ant alarm pheromones. Alarm pheromones robustly activated ≤6 glomeruli, and activity maps for the three pheromones inducing panic alarm in our study species converged on a single glomerulus. These results demonstrate that, rather than using broadly tuned combinatorial encoding, ants employ precise, narrowly tuned, and stereotyped representations of alarm pheromones. The identification of a central sensory hub glomerulus for alarm behavior suggests that a simple neural architecture is sufficient to translate pheromone perception into behavioral outputs.