After an ERC starting, Antoine is back to continue deciphering the incredible navigational abilities of ants!
About the project
Ant navigation: understanding the resilience and self-developing nature of mini-brains in interaction with their environment.
Organisms differ from machines in their resilience: their capacity to spontaneously recover from defects. This is because organisms, contrary to machines, are self-developing systems that change over time, like ‘a melody that sings itself’. The plastic mechanisms that enable animal and human self-development and resilience is barely known, but understanding them would profoundly impact how we apprehend brains, behaviours and their evolution. RESILI-ANT will tackle this question using the stunning ability of solitary foraging ants to visually navigate in complex environments. Ant navigational behaviours develop through stages with strong learning components, and can recover from sensory-motor alterations that would disable any machine. The advantage is that the full ontogeny of these behaviours unfolds in a couple of days, can be easily manipulated, and involves a brain numerically much simpler
and better-known than any vertebrate. We will combine an ecological approach, complexity science and modelling with state-of-theart technologies to dissect the mechanisms underlying these behavioural developmental processes. We will track ant ontogeny under different scenarios; perform straightforward manipulations to disclose the underlying rules; and use virtual reality to probe their ability to compensate for severe sensory-motor defects. In parallel, we will explore how these processes are implemented – in the light of our ever-increasing knowledge of insect circuits – by augmenting our current neural models with network plasticity and recurrent connections between brain areas. The evolutionary causes and consequences of such plastic neural topologies will be investigated using neuro-evolution algorithms selecting for self-developing agents that forage in reconstructed environments. The dialogue between simulations and observation will move us towards a concrete understanding of the self-developing nature, and their fundamental and societal impact.
The CNRS Medal for Scientific Mediation rewards women and men, scientists or research support staff, for their action, punctual or perennial, personal or collective, promoting science in society.
Audrey is now rewarded for her numerous and fascinating scientific works on the behavior and the cognition of ants and blob, through mediation actions.
With her book, several films, numerous exhibitions and festivals and recently a trip to the international space station, Audrey never stops making young and old dream !
Antoine Wystrach is a passionate researcher, biologist by training, in love with neurosciences and evolutionary biology.
He completed his PhD at CRCA, studying ant navigation in the field. After a few years in the United Kingdom modeling the brain and behavior of insects during his post-doctorate, he joined the CRCA as a CNRS researcher.
Today, he studies ant navigation both in the lab and in the field using sophisticated tools such as virtual reality, 3D environments and neural network models...
Antoine's projects are currently supported by an ERC grant.
Mathieu and his collaborators biologists, engineers, modelers and ecologists will study the movement of pollinating insect populations (bees and bumblebees) under natural conditions to better understand and predict their impact on plant reproduction. They will develop a radar system to record the movements of hundreds of insects foraging over several kilometers. By coupling this system to robotic “plants”, the researchers will study how the structure of the landscape and the quality of available resources influence the choice of pollinators.
These experiments, unprecedented on a large scale, will allow the development of predictive models of pollinator movements and pollen flows, which will be tested on natural plant populations. On a longer term, this fundamental research may help to improve crop pollination or the conservation of declining plant or bee species, in a context of widespread environmental crisis.
Aurore Avarguès-Weber, researcher at the CRCA-CBI, was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal last night for her work on bee cognition.
This distinction rewards the first works of researchers who are specialists in their field. It also represents an encouragement by the CNRS to pursue well initiated and already fruitful research.
Each year, the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM) honours outstandingly talented researchers who dedicate their lives to reversing the disease front. On October 14, at the Collège de France in Paris, the FRM awarded 14 scientific and research prizes and 2 communication prizes.
The Scientific Awards recognize researchers who, through the originality of their professional careers, contribute to the progress of knowledge and advances in medical research today and tomorrow.
Claire Rampon, CNRS Research Director and Director of the CRCA, received the 2019 Marie-Paule Burrus prize. This Prize is intended to reward a researcher conducting research on neurodegenerative diseases.
Scarlett Howard, post-doctoral fellow under the direction of Aurore Avargues-Weber of the Giurfa/Devaud team, received the L’Oréal-Unesco Rising Talent Award for Women in Science 2019 !
Her project is to understand the intelligence of bees through virtual reality.
Scarlett is one of the five awarded women from Toulouse.
Through this competitive funding, the European Council Research supports and encourages the highest quality research in Europe, on the basis of scientific excellence.
Martin Giurfa is Exceptional-Class Professor in Neuroscience at Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse).
Martin created a world-leading research group dedicated to the study of how insects learn and adapt their behaviour to environmental challenges, and how this is supported by remodeling of their brain circuits.
In 2007, he was awarded a CNRS Silver Medal, as an acknowledgement of his outstanding career and scientific contribution to the field of integrative neurosciences.
Aurore Avargues-Weber, a researcher at the Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CRCA – CBI Toulouse), has just won the bronze medal from the CNRS.
The bronze medal is awarded for a first work dedicated to a researcher specialized in his field. This distinction represents an encouragement by the CNRS to pursue well initiated and already fruitful research.
His research, conducted in collaboration between B Guiard and M Lapeyre-Mestrede, (Pharmacoepidemiology Toulouse - INSERM UMR1027), focuses on the neurobiological effects and mechanisms of action of pregabalin, a molecule prescribed for the treatment of epilepsy, generalized anxiety or neuropathic pain. Pregabalin is under particular surveillance by health professionals due to an increasing number of cases of abuse.
Indeed, Basile has demonstrated in mice a potentially reinforcing effect of pregabalin without modifying the classic reward circuit, thus confirming the potential for abuse of pregabalin observed in humans. Basile Coutens' data suggest an original mechanism of action independent of the activation of dopamine neurons.
After an ERC starting, Antoine is back to continue deciphering the incredible navigational abilities of ants!
About the project
