The retina is a major sensory input upon which most animal will react to, or learn from, their environment. It is therefore critical to better understand the exact functional architecture of the two canonical and non-canonical visual pathways into the vertebrate brain. High-density electrodes (Neuropixels) can permit to capture axons and their neighboring neurons in vivo. Such technique allows to first confirms the broad and unspecific connectivity to the higher structures of the canonical pathway, while we unravel isomorphic mosaic projections of retino-tectal contacts scaffolding a classical relay function of the non-canonical visual pathway.
In biology, we often consider noise to be a nuisance, obfuscating the otherwise neat deterministic phenomena. Theories have long suggested that noise can be a facilitator of order and many other surprising phenomena. In this talk, using our work on fish and beetles, I argue that characterising stochasticity in collective motion offers novel insights. Furthermore, we argue that noise can also provide insights on local interactions that organisms follow. In case of fish, we find evidence that individuals copy the direction of a randomly chosen neighbor. In beetles, we find that local interaction rules are group-size dependent.