Acoustic signalling for mate attraction in crickets: Abdominal ganglia control the timing of the calling song pattern

Pedro F Jacob,Berthold Hedwig

doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2016.04.025

Abstract

Decoding the neural basis of behaviour requires analysing how the nervous system is organised and how the temporal structure of motor patterns emerges from its activity. The stereotypical patterns of the calling song behaviour of male crickets, which consists of chirps and pulses, is an ideal model to study this question. We applied selective lesions to the abdominal nervous system of field crickets and performed long-term acoustic recordings of the songs. Specific lesions to connectives or ganglia abolish singing or reliably alter the temporal features of the chirps and pulses. Singing motor control appears to be organised in a modular and hierarchically fashion, where more posterior ganglia control the timing of the chirp pattern and structure and anterior ganglia the timing of the pulses. This modular organisation may provide the substrate for song variants underlying calling, courtship and rivalry behaviour and for the species-specific song patterns in extant crickets.

Highlights

Species-specific acoustic signals for mate attraction are used in a wide range of animals like birds, frogs, fishes and insects [1,2,3]
Sound production is under temporal control of the nervous system by the activity of central pattern generators (CPGs) [6,7,8,9]
Experiments were performed on a white-eyed mutant Gryllus bimaculatus, gwhite, isolated from a wild-type lab colony [32]

Summary

Introduction

Species-specific acoustic signals for mate attraction are used in a wide range of animals like birds, frogs, fishes and insects [1,2,3]. These signals are crucial for an individual’s mating success and play a major role in behavioural isolation and in speciation [4]. The most important properties of the acoustic signals rely on their temporal features, e.g. rate, duration, amplitude and subdivision into pulses [10,11]. Revealing how the temporal properties of the acoustic signals emerge from the activity of the nervous system is crucial to understand the neural organisation of the behaviour and to provide new notions for its genetic, molecular biological and evolutionary analysis [21]

Methods

Results

Conclusion