Hosted by Dr. Lisha Shao, Dr. Andrew Gordus of Johns Hopkins University will give a lecture entitled "Untangling the Web of Behaviors Used in Spider Orb-Weaving."

Cognitive states influence which behaviors an animal will execute in any given context. Determining an animal’s cognitive state is often difficult since we must rely on an animal’s behavior to infer these states. However, phenotypes such as architecture provide us with a physical record of behavioral intent. A particularly elegant and easily quantifiable structure is the spider orb-web. We have developed the hackled orb-weaver Uloborus diversus as a model system to understand orb-weaving behavior. With a brain the size of a fly’s, the spider U. diversus offers a tractable organism for the study of complex behaviors. Using machine vision algorithms, we have developed an atlas of stereotyped movements and sensorimotor transformations used in orb-web construction. The rules for how these movements are coordinated change during different phases of web construction, and we find that we can predict web-building stages based on these rules alone. Thus, the physical structures of the web explicitly represent distinct behavioral phases. To uncover how this sophisticated algorithm is encoded in the brain, we have assembled a genome, a brain atlas, and biological assays to understand which neurons and genes are critical to encoding web-building behavior.

Andrew Gordus is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Biology and the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience. He received his PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University and did his postdoctoral work at The Rockefeller University. His research focuses on how invertebrate behaviors are organized at the cellular and genetic levels.