Summary
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1.
When presented with food (sea whipVirgularia sp.), a crawlingTritonia diomedea usually stops and feeds. After an escape swim, however, aTritonia crawls rapidly (the ‘escape run’) and does not stop crawling when presented with food (Fig. 1).
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2.
Complex mechanoreceptors, which are also sensitive to sea whip odor, show striking parallels with this behavior. They are normally excited by food touch, but following a swim they are much less responsive to sea whip touch (Fig. 2). Although they appear to play no role in the actual swim itself, complex receptors fire bursts of spikes during a swim in phase with ventral flexions.
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3.
If spikes are blocked in a complex receptor by injecting hyperpolarizing current during a swim (hyperpolarized swim), the change in responsiveness to sea whip touch after the swim is suppressed (Fig. 3).
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4.
Conversely, stimulating a complex receptor with short pulses of depolarizing current to produce spikes in a pattern similar to a natural swim (artificial swim) elicits a responsiveness change to sea whip touch similar to that evoked by a natural swim (Fig. 4).
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5.
The intrinsic excitability of complex receptors, as measured by the spike response to injected depolarizing current, is also changed by natural and artificial swims (Fig. 6). Suppressing spiking during swimming with hyperpolarizing current also suppresses the excitability change (Fig. 5). The excitability change after artificial swims persists when interneuronal firing is suppressed with high Ca++ (Fig. 7) and high Mg++, high Ca++ solutions.
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6.
It is concluded that the receptor responsiveness change following a swim is produced by the spiking or depolarization of the individual receptor which occurs during a swim. This receptor change may in turn contribute to the behavioral change seen in the intact animal.
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This work was supported by NSF Research Grant BMS 75613579 to A.O.D. Willows, and by NIH National Research Service Awards 1-F32-NS05388-01A1 to Teresa Audesirk and 5-F32-NS05151 to Gerald Audesirk. We would like to thank Dennis Willows and Patricia Dickinson for helpful discussions in the course of this research, and William Stark for critical reading of the manuscript.
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Audesirk, G., Audesirk, T. Complex mechanoreceptors inTritonia diomedea . J. Comp. Physiol. 141, 111–122 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00611884
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00611884