Abstract
An optical method was developed to analyse gastric mill activity in intact and freely behaving lobsters over several days. 1. In undisturbed animals the gastric mill reaches its highest level of activity, about 300 cycles per hour, in the first hour after the uptake of food. It then decreases and reaches its average-level of spontaneous activity of 10 to 40 cph nearly 40 h after feeding. Because of the limited cycle duration of the neural gastric mill oscillator this low activity can only be achieved by switching the oscillator on and off in bouts of several minutes each. Any disturbance to the animal interrupts the gastric mill cycling. 2. Under normal conditions the gastric mill operates with a constant cycle duration of about 20 s from 5 to 15 h after feeding. The injection of eyestalk extract during this period causes a depression of gastric mill cycling lasting about 1 h. 3. Bilateral eyestalk ablation causes enhanced gastric mill activity for a period of about 40 h.
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