Ryan Palmer

The flower, the bee and the charge between: sensing electrical fields in the natural world

Recently, bees and spiders (and other such arthropods) have been shown to detect electrical fields (a sense known as electroreception). Whilst this novel discovery expands our view of how such organisms explore their environment, exactly how this curious sense works remains unclear. With such new discoveries, many questions arise that require both theoretical and empirical examination. In this talk, I will introduce the fundamentals of this sensory phenomena, and uncover some of the mechanical and sensory complexities that have been discovered through mathematical studies.

I will explain the mechanics of electroreception via sensory hairs and show the physical and biological feasibility of this sense. From this basis, I will delve deeper into the interactions between hairs and electrical fields introducing the concept of a sensitivity contour (regions of the solution space where hairs deflect to a given sensory threshold), and examine how a hair’s sensory capability changes owing to electrical interactions between hairs. Finally, I will discuss some of the sensory possibilities of electroreception (e.g. object identification and location detection) and the biological implications of this (e.g. foraging decisions, predator-prey behaviour).