Worms doing calculus?

Worms do calculus to find food. (Um, not really.)

But apparently worms use salt concentration to find food, and tend to head in the direction of the gradient of salt concentration. That is, they go where there's more salt. This is due to neuroscientist Shawn Lockery and his students at the University of Oregon. I think the paper is the following:

Suzuki H, Thiele TR, Faumont S, Ezcurra M, Lockery SR, Schafer WR (2008). "Circuit motifs for spatial orientation behaviors identified by neural network optimization." Nature 454:114-117.

but I can't be 100 percent sure -- Penn's libraries don't allow access to the electronic version of papers from Nature until twelve months have passed, and I'm not on campus right now. (This is, however, the only paper on Lockery's list with a title fitting the description.)

Saying "worms do calculus to find food" seems a bit disingenuous to me, though. It seems like saying that baseball players do calculus to catch fly balls. The larger point, though, is that neural processes -- of worms or of humans -- can be modeled using mathematical techniques, which may be of use to people trying to develop artificial systems that do these things.

(From John Scalzi, via 360. Apparently this first appeared in blogs a couple weeks ago, but I'm posting it here anyway, because it's new to me, which means it's probably also new to a lot of you.)