Abstract
Organisms perform adaptive behavior through the coordination of metastable states. Heteroclinic networks are models of metastability that have been well studied in the dynamical systems literature and used to described various biological systems. In this paper, we explore the application of heteroclinic networks to modeling adaptive behaviors at the whole organism level. We consider the pirouette of the nematode worm as an example. We demonstrate how heteroclinic network construction methods can be used to model the worm’s foraging strategy and how analysis of such networks can give insight into the dynamics of adaptive behavior. We consider three different construction methods for modeling observed behavioral states of foraging C. elegans and explore how each construction method provides a different lens for studying such systems.