RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 A plausible mechanism for Drosophila larva intermittent behavior JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.09.19.304774 DO 10.1101/2020.09.19.304774 A1 Panagiotis Sakagiannis A1 Miguel Aguilera A1 Martin Paul Nawrot YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/09/2020.09.19.304774.abstract AB The behavior of many living organisms is not continuous. Rather, activity emerges in bouts that are separated by epochs of rest, a phenomenon known as intermittent behavior. Although intermittency is ubiquitous across phyla, empirical studies are scarce and the underlying neural mechanisms remain unknown. Here we present the first empirical evidence of intermittency during Drosophila larva free exploration. We report power-law distributed rest-bout and log-normal distributed activity-bout durations. We show that a stochastic network model can transition between power-law and non-power-law distributed states and we suggest a plausible neural mechanism for the alternating rest and activity in the larva. Finally, we discuss possible implementations in behavioral simulations extending spatial Levy-walk or coupled-oscillator models with temporal intermittency.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.