ICTP Colloquium Today

ICTP is pleased to host Dr. Anna Gagliardo from the University of Pisa, Italy for an ICTP Colloquium on "Olfactory navigation and familiar visual landmark-based navigation in birds: from homing pigeons to wild species."

The talk will take place today, Thursday 15 February 2018 at 16:30 hrs, in the Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo Building, ICTP. The talk will be livestreamed on ICTP's Youtube and Facebook pages.

Forty years ago Papi and colleagues observed that anosmic pigeons failed to find their way home when released from unfamiliar locations. They explained the dramatic impact on homing by developing the olfactory navigation hypothesis. Quantitative biology is a burgeoning field, with physics models and techniques being applied to all levels of investigation into biological systems.

Gagliardo's work investigates how pigeons at the home loft learn to associate different odour profiles with the wind direction they arrive from. Once at a release site, they determine the direction of displacement on the basis of the odours perceived locally, and based on that information, compute a homeward bearing. Experimental evidence pointed out that the olfactory map becomes redundant within a familiar area, where visual cues constitute an alternative source of information allowing navigation in olfactory deprived pigeons. Some older research hinted at an important role of olfactory cues for the navigation of nesting swifts and starlings, that displayed homing impairments when made anosmic. More recently, new satellite technologies allowed us to track wild birds subjected to olfactory manipulation after displacement from their breeding site or from their migratory route. Tracking experiments in wild species provided evidence consistent with olfactory navigation and visual landmark-based navigation in unfamiliar and familiar areas, respectively.