Meeting Abstract
73.3 Monday, Jan. 6 08:45 Multi-channel extracellular recording supports a gyroscopic function for wings. DICKERSON, BH*; SANDERS, EJ; WOODS, JI; DANIEL, TL; Univ. of Washington; Univ. of Washington; Roosevelt High School; Univ. of Washington bdicker@uw.edu
Flying insects collect and process information from their environment to maintain stability using a host of sensory modalities including vision and mechanoreception. The precision, sensitivity, and rapid processing speeds of mechanoreceptors relative to vision make them critical components of locomotor control. Both dipteran (flies) and strepsipteran (twisted wing flies) insects possess gyroscopic organs known as halteres that allow these animals to detect and correct for any perturbations to the flight path. Moreover, halteres are derived from wings and are specific to only those two insect orders. The wings of all insects possess the same mechanosensory structures as the halteres, campaniform sensilla. Evolution, therefore, suggests that the wings of many insects could serve as gyroscopic sensors. Indeed, recent anatomical, electrophysiological, and behavioral evidence confirms that the wings of the hawkmoth Manduca sexta inform the animal of its body dynamics. However, linking the wings’ bending dynamics to the encoding properties of these embedded mechanoreceptors is a critical challenge for understanding how the wing functions as a combined sensor and actuator. Until recently only single unit recording methods have been developed, limiting our ability to assess correlations among distributed strain sensing sensilla. Using a multi-channel electrode, we performed extracellular recordings from the forewing nerve while mechanically stimulating the wing with frequency and amplitude sweeps and band-limited (10-300 Hz) Gaussian white noise using a motorized lever arm. We extract stimulus features that drive multiple individual unit responses and show (a) response latencies of units are within 5 to 10 milliseconds following the stimulus and (b) a rapid rate of information transfer consistent with haltere function.
