Meeting Abstract
Many animals use Earth’s magnetic field to acquire positional or directional information for use during directed travel. However, despite its widespread occurrence across phylogeny, magnetoreception remains poorly understood. Biological tissues are generally transparent to magnetic information, so magnetoreceptors are not necessarily limited to particular areas of the body and thus have been difficult to localize. By necessity, studies of magnetoreception mechanism largely rely on indirect, transduction-specific methods to disrupt magnetoreception. One such method is the application of a strong magnetic pulse: if the transduction method utilized by the animal is based on ferromagnetic particles, a strong magnetic pulse can realign their magnetization, disrupting normal magnetic field transduction. Studies utilizing magnetic pulse-based disruption of magnetoreception have determined whether a pulse affects animal orientation, but the directional nature of magnetic pulses suggests that these experiments could also be used to perform directional ablations. That is, the effects of directionality of the pulse—and thus ferromagnetic particle realignment—could help us deduce how the magnetic field might be processed. For instance, if there is a consistent orientation effect dependent on pulse direction, that might suggest how signals from multiple receptors could be combined. Here, we use existing multidirectional pulse data collected from the Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus to develop a conceptual receptor array and neural circuit model for processing directional information. By constructing a model which responds similarly to magnetic pulse disruptions, we hope to more closely approximate processing of the magnetic field in Panulirus argus.
