[
International Worm Meeting,
2019]
For animals that do not provide parental care, when and where eggs are laid in the environment can have profound effects on the reproductive success of an individual. Because of its importance, it is not surprising that egg-laying is highly regulated in response to environmental cues. This regulation, coupled with the well described neural circuitry involved in the act of egg-laying, make it a great system for studying how animals interpret their environment and make behavioral choices. To facilitate this line of research we have developed a microfluidic "egg-counter" that allows 32 nematodes to reside in individual growth chambers while their egg-laying behavior is recorded at a sub-minute temporal resolution. The platform utilizes a perfusion-based feeding system that allows experimental control of the chemical environment as well as a built-in temperature control unit that allows the temperature to be patterned with 0.1 deg C accuracy without the use of incubators or temperature control rooms. Preliminary analysis of egg-laying behavior from wildtype animals in our microfluidic environment grossly fits that of the three-state model used to describe egg-laying on agar plates, with the log-tail distribution of egg-laying intervals exhibiting a bi-phasic distribution consistent with two interval types, inter and intra-cluster intervals. We will present a genetic characterization of the role of insulin signaling in regulating egg-laying behavior.