Abstract
Tethered crickets flying in a wind tunnel adopt a characteristic posture in which the antennae are pointed in parallel and anteriorly into the headwind. Although the firing rates of antennal motoneurons are largely reduced after the start of a flight sequence, the associated postural changes of the antennae are small. It is hypothesised that proctolin, which is present in antennal motoneurons, stabilises the prolonged antennal forward position. To test this hypothesis, proctolin was blocked by anti-proctolin antiserum injections into one antennal base in otherwise intact behaving crickets. The antiserum quickly led to prolonged backward deflections of the treated antennae in 65% of cases. It then took more than one hour for the deflected posture to revert to a normal flight posture. It appears that proctolin is necessary to produce muscle tension large enough to hold the antennae in a forward position and to compensate for the headwind drag. Proctolin, therefore, acts to generate force with reduced electrical activity of motoneurons and muscles.
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Dr. Hans Agricola, Jena, who kindly left his anti-proctolin antiserum (BMFT project 0316919 A) to me. He also provided valuable comments on the manuscript. I would like to thank Dr. Hans-Willi Honegger, Nashville, and Geoffrey Manley, Ph.D., Garching, for fruitful discussions and for improving this article. Some injection experiments were performed by D. Brünnert and I. Schiöberg as part of their advanced zoology practical in Garching. I thank two anonymous referees who helped to improve this paper.
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Gebhardt, M. In vivo-application of anti-proctolin-antiserum affects antennal flight posture in crickets. J Comp Physiol A 190, 359–364 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-004-0500-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-004-0500-0