Snap decisions of dragonflies

Adelaide scientists have taken a step closer to understanding the rapid decision-making of insect brains in a bid to recreate these capacities in the human world, via software and computing.

Dragonflies visually detect prey, rapidly pursuing these targets via acrobatic flights. Now their neuronal “spike bursting” has been described in a 2021 Scientific Reports article.

“Dragonflies are a far more impressive flying machine than anything humanity has ever engineered, even though their brain is only the size of a few dozen grains of sand,” says lead author Flinders University research associate Dr Joseph Fabian.

Science tends to be “human-centric” in our research interests, but we should always remember that even the “simplest” animals are incredibly complex and impressive, he says.

“If an alien spaceship capable of one-tenth of a dragonfly’s behavioural repertoire crashed to earth tomorrow, armies of scientists would study it in detail for the next decade.”

Dr Fabian and ARC Future Fellow Associate Professor  Steven Wiederman, from University of Adelaide, studied how the most studied target-detecting neuron in dragonflies, CSTMD1, responds to moving targets with a series of spike bursts.

 

The insect world is full of animals with simple biology, but remarkably efficient and impressive behaviour. These little creatures can adapt to novel situations and they display a wide array of different behaviours. Yet they achieve all this while having only around 1 million neurons in their tiny brains.

The new paper identifies a novel bursting mechanism in the responses of visual target-detecting neurons in the dragonfly brain.

These neurons have been studied as a model for complex physiological phenomena over the last 30 years, but this novel result raises new possibilities for how the responses of these neurons might be interpreted.

Neurons communicate with each other in different ways, and each approach comes with a set of advantages and disadvantages.

“We present convincing evidence that some target-detecting neurons communicate using bursts of activity and discuss how this strategy might enhance their ability to track fast moving objects like prey,” Dr Joseph says.

“By studying these systems, we can uncover general principles which can be applied to neuroscience, medicine and engineering,” he says.

The article, Spike bursting in a dragonfly target-detecting neuron (2021) by Joseph M. Fabian & Steven D. Wiederman, was published in Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-83559-5

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