Neural temporal scaling accounts for robust hunting behavior across temperatures

Animals are often required to maintain stable performance in critical behaviors despite environmental fluctuations. Temperature affects neural activity, and even localized shifts in brain temperature can alter behavior. However, whether widespread changes across the brain, as experienced by ectotherms, disrupt survival-critical behaviors remains unclear. We show that larval zebrafish maintain robust hunting performance across a 10°C ecological range. Although behavior accelerates with temperature, spatial parameters, such as bout distance and turn angle, remain stable during hunting but not during exploration, highlighting context-specific robustness. This invariance results from coordinated adjustments in tail beat frequency and movement duration. Calcium imaging across multiple brain regions revealed that temperature-dependent behavioral temporal scaling is mirrored at the single-neuron level. A simple rate model illustrates how temperature-dependent changes in neural time constants can account for compensatory tail dynamics, enabling stability without active regulation. Together, these findings indicate that neural temporal scaling can preserve performance in survival-critical behaviors under diffuse temperature fluctuations. The neural basis of behavioral adaptation to temperature is not fully understood. Here authors show that zebrafish larvae keep hunting performance stable across a 10°C range. As temperature increases, brain activity and tail beats speed up while movement duration shortens, preserving distance and capture success, consistent with neural time scaling.