Abstract
A wide diversity of organisms use photoperiod (daylength) as an environmental cue to anticipate the changing seasons and to time various life-history events such as dormancy and migration. Photoperiodic time measurement consists of two main components, (1) the photoperiodic timer that discriminates between long and short days, and (2) the photoperiodic counter that accumulates and stores information from the timer and then induces the phenotypic output. Herein, we use extended night treatments to show that light is necessary to accumulate photoperiodic information across the geographic range of the mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii and that the photoperiodic counter counts extrinsic (external) light:dark cycles and not endogenous (internal) circadian cycles.
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Abbreviations
- LDC50 :
-
Number of light:dark cycles necessary to elicit 50% development
- L:D:
-
Light:dark
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank N. Bowen for her hours, odd and numerous, assisting with this project, S. Carroll and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on early versions of the manuscript. All work presented here complied with the “Principles of animal care,” publication No. 86-23 of the National Institute of Health, and also with current laws of the United States, where these experiment were performed. This work was made possible by generous support from the National Science Foundation through grants DEB-0412573 and IOB-0445710 to WEB, and the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health through training grants DGE-0504727 and 5-T32-GMO7413, respectively, to KJE.
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Emerson, K.J., Letaw, A.D., Bradshaw, W.E. et al. Extrinsic light:dark cycles, rather than endogenous circadian cycles, affect the photoperiodic counter in the pitcher-plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii . J Comp Physiol A 194, 611–615 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-008-0334-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-008-0334-2