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Processing of Species-Specific Signals in the Auditory Pathway of Grasshoppers

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Insect Hearing and Acoustic Communication

Part of the book series: Animal Signals and Communication ((ANISIGCOM,volume 1))

Abstract

Species-specific acoustic signals of grasshoppers serve to attract mates; they are pivotal in avoiding hybridisation with sympatric species and to evaluate a potential mate’s quality. This necessitates a high precision of neuronal processing, which is constrained by the noisy nature of neuronal activity. Applying a spike train metric to estimate the variability of auditory responses, we quantified the respective impacts that external degradation of acoustic signals and intrinsic neuronal noise exert on signal processing. Unexpectedly, the variability of spike patterns increases from the afferents to the neurons whose axons ascend to the brain and reduces their ability to discriminate between similar communication signals. Between thoracic local and ascending neurons a change of coding principles seems to occur, leading to a population code with labelled-line characteristics. Thoracic auditory processing is conserved between distantly related species, suggesting that during evolution the communication signals have been adapted to match properties of the receiver’s sensory system.

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Acknowledgements

I thank all members of my lab who contributed to the work reported here, in particular Matthias Hennig for years of fruitful collaboration and many stimulating discussions. I also thank Daniela Neuhofer, Jana Sträter, Astrid Vogel and Sandra Wohlgemuth for providing partially unpublished data. Special thanks to Stefanie Krämer for making the figures. Berthold Hedwig and Carl Gerhardt gave valuable suggestions that helped to improve the manuscript. The American Psychological Association, the Royal Society, and Springer Science and Business Media very kindly allowed the reproduction of figures. Financial support from the German Research Council (SFB 618, GRK 837, GRK 1589/1) and the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience (Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany, grant 01GQ1001A) is also gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Department of Biology and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Bernhard Ronacher

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  1. Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Berthold Hedwig

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Ronacher, B. (2014). Processing of Species-Specific Signals in the Auditory Pathway of Grasshoppers. In: Hedwig, B. (eds) Insect Hearing and Acoustic Communication. Animal Signals and Communication, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40462-7_11

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