Meeting Abstract
When animals move they must coordinate motion among multiple parts of the musculoskeletal system. While different behaviors exhibit different levels of coordination it remains unclear what general principles determine what level of coordination is ideal for a particular behavior. One hypothesis is that velocity determines coordination levels as a result of differences in active versus passsive motor control. An alternative hypothesis is that coordination is determined by the extent to which the motor system engages in one task (monotasking) versus multiple tasks (multitasking). To test these hypotheses we measured motor coordination within the highly kinetic skulls of channel catfish during feeding. We used X-ray reconstruction of moving morphology (XROMM) and joint model fitting to reduce the 3D movements of 7 skeletal elements into 8 principal motions and cross-correlation to measure changes in motor integration, which we argue represent changes in coordination. We found that motion was significantly more coordinated (by 25%) during prey capture than during transport, supporting the hypothesis that motor mono- versus multitasking determines coordination levels. We found no significant difference in coordination between motions grouped by speed or intraoral pressure. We propose that capture is more coordinated to create a single fluid flow into the mouth (monotasking) while transport is less coordinated so that cranial elements can more independently generate multiple flows to reposition prey (multitasking). Our results demonstrate the benefits of both high and low coordination for natural animal behaviors and the potential of motion data to reveal how the neural system structures animal movement. Funded by NSF grants 1612230, 1655756, and 1661129.
