The authors made several errors in reporting the average duration of isothermal tracks made by C. elegans on spatial thermal gradients of varying gradient steepness and on spatial thermal gradients in the presence of bacterial food. These errors affect the paper in three places.
The second and third sentence in the second paragraph of the Results on p. 4653 should have read as follows (with changes shown in bold):
Using radial thermal gradients with a defined steepness of 0.2–1.3°C cm–1, we found that the durations of isothermal tracks are exponentially distributed and on average about 35 s long. In other words, the statistics of terminating an isothermal track are Poisson: during each second of an isothermal track, C. eleganshas a 3% likelihood of terminating the track by spontaneously reorienting itself with an abrupt turn of reversal (Fig. 1D).
Fig. 1E should have appeared as shown below:
The caption for Fig. 2B should have read as follows (with changes shown in bold):
(B) Histogram of the durations of isothermal tracks of wild-type worms navigating a radial thermal gradient with 0.7°C cm–1 steepness in the presence of bacterial lawns. The solid line shows a fit to an exponential (τ=102 s; P>0.2).
These errors do not affect the conclusions of the paper, namely that isothermal tracks are much longer than runs in isotropic environments and that isothermal tracks in the presence of food can be longer than in the absence of food.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Prof. Miriam Goodman (Stanford) for bringing these errors to their attention.
