Crickets alter wind-elicited escape strategies depending on acoustic context

Motor state changes escape behavior of crickets

Animals change their behavior depending on external circumstances, internal factors, and their interactions. Locomotion state is a crucial internal factor that profoundly affects sensory perception and behavior. However, studying the behavioral impacts of locomotion state in free-moving animals has been challenging due to difficulty in reproducing quantitatively identical stimuli in freely moving animals. We utilized a closed-loop controlled servosphere treadmill system, enabling unrestricted confinement and orientation of small animals, and investigated wind-induced escape behavior in freely moving crickets. When stimulated during locomotion, the crickets quickly stopped before initiating escape behavior. Moving crickets exhibited a higher probability of escape response compared to stationary crickets. The threshold for pausing response in moving crickets was also much lower than the escape response threshold. Moving crickets had delayed reaction times for escape and greater variance in movement direction compared to stationary crickets. The locomotion-related response delay may be compensated by an elevated sensitivity to airflow.

Persistence of auditory modulation of wind-induced escape behavior in crickets

Animals, including insects, change their innate escape behavior triggered by a specific threat stimulus depending on the environmental context to survive adaptively the predators' attack. This indicates that additional inputs from sensory organs of different modalities indicating surrounding conditions could affect the neuronal circuit responsible for the escape behavior. Field crickets, Gryllus bimaculatus, exhibit an oriented running or jumping escape in response to short air puff detected by the abdominal mechanosensory organ called cerci. Crickets also receive a high-frequency acoustic stimulus by their tympanal organs on their frontal legs, which suggests approaching bats as a predator. We have reported that the crickets modulate their wind-elicited escape running in the moving direction when they are exposed to an acoustic stimulus preceded by the air puff. However, it remains unclear how long the effects of auditory inputs indicating surrounding contexts last after the sound is terminated. In this study, we applied a short pulse (200 ms) of 15-kHz pure tone to the crickets in various intervals before the air-puff stimulus. The sound given 200 or 1000 ms before the air puff biased the wind-elicited escape running backward, like the previous studies using the longer and overlapped sound. But the sounds that started 2000 ms before and simultaneously with the air puff had little effect. In addition, the jumping probability was higher only when the delay of air puff to the sound was 1000 ms. These results suggest that the cricket could retain the auditory memory for at least one second and alter the motion choice and direction of the wind-elicited escape behavior.

Spatial perception mediated by insect antennal mechanosensory system

Animals perceive their surroundings by using various modalities of sensory inputs to guide their locomotion. Nocturnal insects such as crickets use mechanosensory inputs mediated by their antennae to orient in darkness. Spatial information is acquired via voluntary antennal contacts with surrounding objects, but it remains unclear whether the insects modulate behaviors mediated by other sensory organs based on that information. Crickets exhibit escape behavior in response to a short air-puff, which is detected by the abdominal mechanosensory organs called cerci and is perceived as a “predator approach” signal. We placed objects of different shapes at different locations with which the cricket actively made contact using its antenna. We then examined the effects on wind-elicited escape behavior. The crickets changed their movement trajectory in response to nearby objects like walls so that they could avoid collision with these obstacles even during the cercal-mediated behavior. For instance, when a wall was placed in front of the crickets so that it was detected by one antenna, the escape trajectory in response to a stimulus from behind was significantly biased toward the side opposite the wall. Even when the antenna on the free side without the wall was ablated, this collision avoidance was also observed, suggesting that the mechanosensory inputs from one antenna detecting an object edge would be sufficient to perceive the location of obstacle in front. This study demonstrated that crickets were able to use the spatial information acquired with their antennal system to modify their behavior mediated by other sensory organs.

Action selection based on multiple-stimulus aspects in wind-elicited escape behavior of crickets

Escape behavior is essential for animals to avoid attacks by predators. In some species, multiple escape responses could be employed. However, it remains unknown what aspects of threat stimuli affect the choice of an escape response. We focused on two distinct escape responses (running and jumping) to short airflow in crickets and examined the effects of multiple stimulus aspects including the angle, velocity, and duration on the choice between these responses. The faster and longer the airflow, the more frequently the crickets jumped. This meant that the choice of an escape response depends on both the velocity and duration of the stimulus and suggests that the neural basis for choosing an escape response includes the integration process of multiple stimulus parameters. In addition, the moving speed and distance changed depending on the stimulus velocity and duration for running but not for jumping. Running away would be more adaptive escape behavior.

Deep learning-assisted comparative analysis of animal trajectories with DeepHL

A comparative analysis of animal behavior (e.g., male vs. female groups) has been widely used to elucidate behavior specific to one group since pre-Darwinian times. However, big data generated by new sensing technologies, e.g., GPS, makes it difficult for them to contrast group differences manually. This study introduces DeepHL, a deep learning-assisted platform for the comparative analysis of animal movement data, i.e., trajectories. This software uses a deep neural network based on an attention mechanism to automatically detect segments in trajectories that are characteristic of one group. It then highlights these segments in visualized trajectories, enabling biologists to focus on these segments, and helps them reveal the underlying meaning of the highlighted segments to facilitate formulating new hypotheses. We tested the platform on a variety of trajectories of worms, insects, mice, bears, and seabirds across a scale from millimeters to hundreds of kilometers, revealing new movement features of these animals.

Wiring patterns from auditory sensory neurons to the escape and song-relay pathways in fruit flies

Many animals rely on acoustic cues to decide what action to take next. Unraveling the wiring patterns of the auditory neural pathways is prerequisite for understanding such information processing. Here, we reconstructed the first step of the auditory neural pathway in the fruit fly brain, from primary to secondary auditory neurons, at the resolution of transmission electron microscopy. By tracing axons of two major subgroups of auditory sensory neurons in fruit flies, low-frequency tuned Johnston's organ (JO)-B neurons and high-frequency tuned JO-A neurons, we observed extensive connections from JO-B neurons to the main second-order neurons in both the song-relay and escape pathways. In contrast, JO-A neurons connected strongly to a neuron in the escape pathway. Our findings suggest that heterogeneous JO neuronal populations could be recruited to modify escape behavior whereas only specific JO neurons contribute to courtship behavior. We also found that all JO neurons have postsynaptic sites at their axons. Presynaptic modulation at the output sites of JO neurons could affect information processing of the auditory neural pathway in flies.

Trade-off between motor performance and behavioural flexibility in the action selection of cricket escape behaviour

To survive a predator’s attack successfully, animals choose appropriate actions from multiple escape responses. The motor performance of escape response governs successful survival, which implies that the action selection in escape behaviour is based on the trade-off between competing behavioural benefits. Thus, quantitative assessment of motor performance will shed light on the biological basis of decision-making. To explore the trade-off underlying the action selection, we focused on two distinct wind-elicited escape responses of crickets, running and jumping. We first hypothesized a trade-off between speed and directional accuracy. This hypothesis was rejected because crickets could control the escape direction in jumping as precisely as in running; further, jumping had advantages with regard to escape speed. Next, we assumed behavioural flexibility, including responsiveness to additional predator’s attacks, as a benefit of running. The double stimulus experiment revealed that crickets running in the first response could respond more frequently to a second stimulus and control the movement direction more precisely compared to when they chose jumping for the first response. These data suggest that not only the motor performance but also the future adaptability of subsequent behaviours are considered as behavioural benefits, which may be used for choosing appropriate escape reactions.

Multisensory enhancement of burst activity in an insect auditory neuron

Detecting predators is crucial for survival. In insects, a few sensory interneurons receiving sensory input from a distinct receptive organ extract specific features informing the animal about approaching predators and mediate avoidance behaviors. Although integration of multiple sensory cues relevant to the predator enhances sensitivity and precision, it has not been established whether the sensory interneurons that act as predator detectors integrate multiple modalities of sensory inputs elicited by predators. Using intracellular recording techniques, we found that the cricket auditory neuron AN2, which is sensitive to the ultrasound-like echolocation calls of bats, responds to airflow stimuli transduced by the cercal organ, a mechanoreceptor in the abdomen. AN2 enhanced spike outputs in response to cross-modal stimuli combining sound with airflow, and the linearity of the summation of multisensory integration depended on the magnitude of the evoked response. The enhanced AN2 activity contained bursts, triggering avoidance behavior. Moreover, cross-modal stimuli elicited larger and longer lasting excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSP) than unimodal stimuli, which would result from a sublinear summation of EPSPs evoked respectively by sound or airflow. The persistence of EPSPs was correlated with the occurrence and structure of burst activity. Our findings indicate that AN2 integrates bimodal signals and that multisensory integration rather than unimodal stimulation alone more reliably generates bursting activity. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Crickets detect ultrasound with their tympanum and airflow with their cercal organ and process them as alert signals of predators. These sensory signals are integrated by auditory neuron AN2 in the early stages of sensory processing. Multisensory inputs from different sensory channels enhanced excitatory postsynaptic potentials to facilitate burst firing, which could trigger avoidance steering in flying crickets. Our results highlight the cellular basis of multisensory integration in AN2 and possible effects on escape behavior.