Meeting Abstract

101.4  Sunday, Jan. 6  Moths respond to inertial yaw rotations with lateral abdominal movements. DICKERSON, BH*; HOWELL, DB; DANIEL, TL; University of Washington bdicker@uw.edu

Multimodal sensory information processing is a key component of insect flight control. While visual information is crucial, mechanoreception serves an equally important role because of its relatively fast processing time. For example, in both tethered and freely flying hawkmoths, there is a powerful abdominal reflex to a mechanical pitch stimulus, an axis of rotation in which the animal is unstable. However, in other rotational axes, there is no clear evidence supporting abdominal reflexive responses to inertial rotational stimuli in the yaw axis. To determine whether there are responses to pure yaw rotation, we tethered hawkmoths, Manduca sexta (n = 6) to a rotating servomotor. Moths were subject repeated trials of 2.5 Hz sinusoidal rotations with an amplitude of 40 degrees under both light and dark conditions. In all trials, moths exhibited flight behavior. We found that there is a significant abdominal response to yaw stimuli with a gain of 0.19 ± 0.1. Thus both yaw and pitch stimuli induce significant abdominal reflexes. Those responses could be detected by mechanosensory structures in the antennae or elsewhere, such as in the wings.