Experiments indicate that the environment plays a significant role in shaping coordinated movement. Here we explore environmental variations and their influence on C. elegans locomotion with respect to parameters such as fluid viscosity.

We compare the postures generated by the model to in-vivo experiments in which the viscosity of the surrounding agar fluid was altered by dropping a droplet of water (lower viscosity than agar). We mimic such an experiment by simulating the locomotion in two different viscosity values corresponding to either agar or water.

Changing fluid viscosity from agar (control) to water (low viscosity) - Experiment (Left), Model (Right)

We observe that for the control environment (agar), the model generates movement that features a “sine”-shaped posture qualitatively similar to that of the experiment, whereas for low viscosity (water) the same stimulation corresponds to extreme strokes in body postures, atypical to C. elegans forward motion. When compared to experimental body curvatures in water, these postures have similar overall C-shaped postures as demonstrated in model video.