Meeting Abstract

33.3  Monday, Jan. 5  Wing mechanosensors can transmit bending information at high bit rates. ALDWORTH, Z. N.*; DANIEL, T. L.; University of Washington, Seattle; University of Washington, Seattle zna@u.washington.edu

All insects are equipped with mechanosensory structures in their wings (campaniform sensilla), many of which encode wing bending or strain. In large insects, such as Manduca sexta, wings deform significantly during flight. Moreover such deformation can be an important determinant of the aerodynamic forces generated by such wings. Additionally, the bending waves seen in Manduca wings may travel at high speeds, well in excess of the time associated with a single wing flap. The extent to which the nervous system can encode such information, however, remains unknown. To address this issue we measured the information transfer rates (bit rates) of wing mechanosensors. We used a band limited Gaussian white noise mechanical stimulus applied to wings with simultaneous intracellular recording from primary sensory neurons. From the statistics of the signal and the emergent spike train we were able to compute the information carried by each spike, and the information transfer rate (bits/s) as a function of stimulus frequency. We found that the jitter (standard deviation of spike occurrence time) is extremely low (200 microseconds) and that the bit rate of information transfer exceeds 100 bit/s and is maximal at a frequency of at least 200 Hz. These results suggest that mechanosensory neurons can transmit strain information at rates that are sufficiently fast to detect bending waves of flapping wings.