Viraaj and Nirag’s paper is now on eLife! Motivated by recent studies of walking fruit flies from our lab and others, they use simulations and theory to investigate why in some environments it is more beneficial for navigation to extract and respond to the proportion of time the odor signal is present, while in others it is better to respond to the frequency of encounters with odor filaments. They find that being able to sense both features enables success across diverse odor environments, albeit with a steep tradeoff in performance as simulated agents preferentially use one feature over the other. Furthermore, they also investigate whether such processing of odor signals is implemented by existing biophysical models of signal transduction in the Drosophila olfactory circuit. https://elifesciences.org/articles/72415