Meeting Abstract
When an organism transitions into a new life stage, it often must adjust its behavior to respond differently to environmental cues. Typically, in the transition from juvenile to adult, resources must be directed away from growth/development and put either toward dispersing or finding a mate and reproducing. In wing-dimorphic Gryllus crickets, during early adulthood individuals specialize either in reproduction or dispersal. This is likely to influence how they organize their activity, but nothing is presently known about how locomotor patterns change over the course of early adulthood. We predicted that there would be differences between the dispersal and reproductive morphs apparent during the night following day 5, because that is a critical age and time at which the dispersal morph is prepared for its dispersal flight. We examined these activity patterns across both day and night in individually reared crickets, kept in an incubator at 27° Celsius with a cycle of 16 hours light and 8 hours dark. Using Biotracker, we compared the total movement of each individual from days 0 to 1 of adulthood to its total movement from days 5 to 6. Our data show that crickets moved greater total distances from days 5 to 6 than they did from days 0 to 1. This increase occurred only at night. Surprisingly, there was no difference in total nighttime movement between morphs. Therefore, there is evidence that circadian organization of locomotion increases over the course of adulthood, but other stimuli may be necessary to trigger the increased activity associated with dispersal flight.
