Towards an Understanding of the Neural Basis of Acoustic Communication in Crickets
Their conspicuous acoustic communication behaviour makes crickets excellent model systems to study the neural mechanisms underlying signal generation and auditory pattern recognition. Male singing is driven by a central pattern generator (CPG) housed in t
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Towards an Understanding of the Neural Basis of Acoustic Communication in Crickets Berthold Hedwig
Abstract Their conspicuous acoustic communication behaviour makes crickets excellent model systems to study the neural mechanisms underlying signal generation and auditory pattern recognition. Male singing is driven by a central pattern generator (CPG) housed in the metathoracic and anterior abdominal ganglia with rhythmically active opener and closer interneurons that can reset the chirp rhythm. Command neurons descending from the brain control the singing behaviour. Female phonotaxis is tuned towards the species-specific pattern of the male calling song and auditory orientation behaviour demonstrates a parallel organisation of pattern recognition and highly accurate steering. First order auditory processing occurs in the thorax and pattern recognition in the brain. Local auditory brain neurons are tuned to the structure of the calling song, based on fast integration of inhibitory and excitatory synaptic activity. How pattern recognition is linked to the generation of auditory steering commands still remains an open question.
8.1 Introduction More than 2,000 species of crickets use species-specific acoustic signals for intraspecific communication (Alexander 1962). Today, their conspicuous behaviour has been the focus of ethological, biophysical and neurophysiological research for 100 years (Regen 1913) and has led to major scientific contributions to the comprehensive characterisation of an insect auditory behaviour and its neural pathway (Huber and Thorson 1985), the neural basis of bat avoidance (Nolen and Hoy 1984), neural mechanisms of selective attention (Pollack 1988; Sobel and Tank 1994) the cellular mechanisms of a corollary discharge mechanism
B. Hedwig (*) Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK e-mail: [email protected]
B. Hedwig (ed.), Insect Hearing and Acoustic Communication, Animal Signals and Communication 1, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-40462-7_8, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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Fig. 8.1 a Male and female cricket acoustic communication behaviour; while the male sings its calling song in front of a burrow the female approaches by orienting towards the song. Modified from Roesel von Rosenhof (1749) species probably G. campestris. b Variety of calling song patterns of sympatric cricket species in Azerbaijan. (1) Pteronemobius heydeni Fish., (2) Tartarogryllus bucharicus B.-B.; (3) Tartarogryllus tartarus obscurior Uv. (4) Tartarogryllus burdigalensis Latr. (5) Oecanthus pellucens Scop. (6) Turanogryllus lateralis Fieb. (7) Gryllus bimaculatus DeGeer (8) Modicogryllus pallipalpis Farb. Modified from (Popov et al. 1974; Fig. 8.1) with permission of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste
(Poulet and Hedwig 2002, 2006), biophysical and neural mechanisms of directional hearing (Michelsen et al. 1994; Michelsen and Löhe 1995; Schöneich and Hedwig 2010) frequency processing in the afferent and central pathway (Nocke 1
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