Comparative study of spectral sensitivity, irradiance sensitivity, spatial resolution and temporal resolution in the visual systems of Ocypode quadrata and Aratus pisonii

Early pioneering studies by Autrum on terrestrial arthropods first revealed that the visual systems of arthropods reflected their lifestyles and habitats. Subsequent studies have examined and confirmed Autrum's hypothesis that visual adaptions are driven by predator-prey interactions and activity cycles, with rapidly moving predatory diurnal species generally possessing better temporal resolution than slower moving nocturnal species. However, few studies have compared the vision between diurnal herbivores and nocturnal predators. In this study, the visual physiology of a nocturnal fast-moving predatory crab, the Atlantic ghost crab (Ocypode quadrata) and a diurnal herbivorous crab, the mangrove tree crab (Aratus pisonii), was examined. Spectral sensitivity, irradiance sensitivity and temporal resolution of the crabs were quantified using the electroretinogram (ERG), while the spatial resolution was calculated utilizing morphological methods. Both O. quadrata and A. pisonii had a single dark-adapted spectral sensitivity peak (494 and 499 nm, respectively) and chromatic adaptation had no effect on their spectral sensitivity, indicating that both species have monochromatic visual systems. The temporal resolution of O. quadrata was not significantly different from that of A. pisonii, but O. quadrata did possess a significantly greater spatial resolution and irradiance sensitivity. Both species possess an acute zone in the anterior region of their eyes. The data presented in this study will aid in the current understanding of the correlation between visual physiology and the life history of the animal.

Opsin1 regulates light-evoked avoidance behavior in Aedes albopictus

BACKGROUND

Mosquitoes locate a human host by integrating various sensory cues including odor, thermo, and vision. However, their innate light preference and its genetic basis that may predict the spatial distribution of mosquitoes, a prerequisite to encounter a potential host and initiate host-seeking behaviors, remains elusive.

RESULTS

Here, we first studied mosquito visual features and surprisingly uncovered that both diurnal (Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) and nocturnal (Culex quinquefasciatus) mosquitoes significantly avoided stronger light when given choices. With consistent results from multiple assays, we found that such negative phototaxis maintained throughout development to adult stages. Notably, female mosquitoes significantly preferred to bite hosts in a shaded versus illuminated area. Furthermore, silencing Opsin1, a G protein-coupled receptor that is most enriched in compound eyes, abolished light-evoked avoidance behavior of Aedes albopictus and attenuated photonegative behavior in Aedes aegypti. Finally, we found that field-collected Aedes albopictus also prefers darker area in an Opsin1-dependent manner.

CONCLUSIONS

This study reveals that mosquitoes consistently prefer darker environment and identifies the first example of a visual molecule that modulates mosquito photobehavior.

Digital optofluidic compound eyes with natural structures and zooming capability for large-area fluorescence sensing

Compound eyes are ubiquitous natural biosensors that possess high temporal resolution and large fields of view (FOVs). While for solid materials based artificial imaging systems, flexible zooming ability while keeping the constant FOV is still challenging, as well as the low-cost fabrication. Herein, liquid compound eyes with natural structures are presented that synthesize optofluidics and bionics in a non-trivial manner, which enables the deformation-free zooming and flexible cell fluorescence sensing. Experimental results indicate that the innovatively manufactured bionic template possesses low roughness and uniform lens configuration with more than two thousands units, which endows the eyes with high-quality and low aberration imaging ability. Besides, digital controlled miscible liquids switching enables the focus of ommatidia simultaneously be adjusted from 150 μm to 5 mm with 100° view angle, and without bending the microlens curvature, to avoid FOV changing and image aberration. Due to large FOV and tunable ability, large-area cell fluorescence signal arrays and dynamic cell motion are imaged using this liquid compound eyes. This work presents novel strategy for compound lens manufacture at low-cost, and proposes deformation-free and continuous focus-tuning strategy, offering potentials for numerous applications, including biomedical sensing and adaptive imaging with large FOV.

Light input pathways to the circadian clock of insects with an emphasis on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster

Light is the most important Zeitgeber for entraining animal activity rhythms to the 24-h day. In all animals, the eyes are the main visual organs that are not only responsible for motion and colour (image) vision, but also transfer light information to the circadian clock in the brain. The way in which light entrains the circadian clock appears, however, variable in different species. As do vertebrates, insects possess extraretinal photoreceptors in addition to their eyes (and ocelli) that are sometimes located close to (underneath) the eyes, but sometimes even in the central brain. These extraretinal photoreceptors contribute to entrainment of their circadian clocks to different degrees. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is special, because it expresses the blue light-sensitive cryptochrome (CRY) directly in its circadian clock neurons, and CRY is usually regarded as the fly’s main circadian photoreceptor. Nevertheless, recent studies show that the retinal and extraretinal eyes transfer light information to almost every clock neuron and that the eyes are similarly important for entraining the fly’s activity rhythm as in other insects, or more generally spoken in other animals. Here, I compare the light input pathways between selected insect species with a focus on Drosophila’s special case.

Vision for navigation: What can we learn from ants?

The visual systems of all animals are used to provide information that can guide behaviour. In some cases insects demonstrate particularly impressive visually-guided behaviour and then we might reasonably ask how the low-resolution vision and limited neural resources of insects are tuned to particular behavioural strategies. Such questions are of interest to both biologists and to engineers seeking to emulate insect-level performance with lightweight hardware. One behaviour that insects share with many animals is the use of learnt visual information for navigation. Desert ants, in particular, are expert visual navigators. Across their foraging life, ants can learn long idiosyncratic foraging routes. What's more, these routes are learnt quickly and the visual cues that define them can be implemented for guidance independently of other social or personal information. Here we review the style of visual navigation in solitary foraging ants and consider the physiological mechanisms that underpin it. Our perspective is to consider that robust navigation comes from the optimal interaction between behavioural strategy, visual mechanisms and neural hardware. We consider each of these in turn, highlighting the value of ant-like mechanisms in biomimetic endeavours.

The sensory arrays of the ant, Temnothorax rugatulus

Individual differences in response thresholds to task-related stimuli may be one mechanism driving task allocation among social insect workers. These differences may arise at various stages in the nervous system. We investigate variability in the peripheral nervous system as a simple mechanism that can introduce inter-individual differences in sensory information. In this study we describe size-dependent variation of the compound eyes and the antennae in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus. Head width in T. rugatulus varies between 0.4 and 0.7 mm (2.6-3.8 mm body length). But despite this limited range of worker sizes we find sensory array variability. We find that the number of ommatidia and of some, but not all, antennal sensilla types vary with head width. The antennal array of T. rugatulus displays the full complement of sensillum types observed in other species of ants, although at much lower quantities than other, larger, studied species. In addition, we describe what we believe to be a new type of sensillum in hymenoptera that occurs on the antennae and on all body segments. T. rugatulus has apposition compound eyes with 45-76 facets per eye, depending on head width, with average lens diameters of 16.5 μm, rhabdom diameters of 5.7 μm and inter-ommatidial angles of 16.8°. The optical system of T. rugatulus ommatidia is severely under focussed, but the absolute sensitivity of the eyes is unusually high. We discuss the functional significance of these findings and the extent to which the variability of sensory arrays may correlate with task allocation.

Drosophila Rhodopsin 7 can partially replace the structural role of Rhodopsin 1, but not its physiological function

Rhodopsin 7 (Rh7), a new invertebrate Rhodopsin gene, was discovered in the genome of Drosophila melanogaster in 2000 and thought to encode for a functional Rhodopsin protein. Indeed, Rh7 exhibits most hallmarks of the known Rhodopsins, except for the G-protein-activating QAKK motif in the third cytoplasmic loop that is absent in Rh7. Here, we show that Rh7 can partially substitute Rh1 in the outer receptor cells (R1–6) for rhabdomere maintenance, but that it cannot activate the phototransduction cascade in these cells. This speaks against a role of Rh7 as photopigment in R1–6, but does not exclude that it works in the inner photoreceptor cells.

Agonistic display or courtship behavior? A review of contests over mating opportunity in butterflies

Male butterflies compete over mating opportunities. Two types of contest behavior are reported. Males of various butterfly species compete over a mating territory via aerial interactions until one of the two contestants retreats. Males of other butterfly species fly around larval food plants to find receptive females. Males of some species among the latter type can find a conspecific pupa, and they gather around it without expelling their rivals. Scramble competition over mating occurs when a female emerges from the pupa. Many studies have been performed on territorial species, and their contest resolution has often been understood from the point of view of contest models based on game theory. However, these models cannot explain why these butterflies perform contest displays despite the fact that they do not have the ability to attack their opponent. A recent study based on Lloyd Morgan’s Canon showed that territorial contests of male butterflies are better understood as erroneous courtship between sexually active males. In this paper, I review research on contests over mating opportunity in butterflies, and show that the erroneous courtship framework can explain not only territorial contests of butterflies but also why males do not determine the owner of a conspecific pupa.

Insights into the morphology of symbiotic shrimp eyes (Crustacea, Decapoda, Palaemonidae); the effects of habitat demands

Morphometric differences in the optical morphology of symbiotic palaemonid shrimps can be observed among species symbiotic with different host organisms. Discriminant functional analysis revealed three distinct groups within the species examined. Of these, bivalve symbionts appear to have an eye design that is solely unique to this host-symbiont grouping, a design that spans across multiple genera of phylogenetically unrelated animals. Although some taxonomic effects may be evident, this does not explain the difference and similarities in eye morphology that are seen within these shrimps. Therefore evolutionary pressures from their host environments are having an impact on the optical morphology of their eyes however, as indicated by host-hopping events there ecological adaptations occur post host invasion.

The visual system of the Australian 'Redeye' cicada (Psaltoda moerens)

We investigated the functional anatomy of the visual system in the Australian 'Redeye' cicada Psaltoda moerens, including compound eyes and ocelli. The compound eyes have large visual fields, about 7500 ommatidia per eye and binocular overlaps of 10-15° in the frontal and of 50-60° in the dorsal visual field. The diameters of corneal facet lenses range between 22 and 34 μm and the lenses are unusually long with up to 100 μm in some eye regions. In the posterior part of the eyes, the hexagonal facet array changes to a square lattice. The compound eyes are of the eucone apposition type with 8 retinular cells contributing to a fused rhabdom in each ommatidium. The red eye colour is due to the pigment granules in the secondary pigment cells. We found a small Dorsal Rim Area (DRA), in which rhabdom cross-sections are rectangular rather than round. The cross-sections of DRA rhabdoms do not systematically change orientation along the length of the rhabdom, indicating that microvilli directions do not twist, which would make retinular cells in the DRA polarization sensitive. The three ocelli have unusual lenses with a champagne-cork shape in longitudinal sections. Retinular cells are short in the dorsal and ventral part of the retinae, and long in their equatorial part. Ocellar rhabdoms are short (<10 μm), positioned close to the corneagenous layer and are formed by pairs of retinular cells. In cross-section, the rhabdomeres are 2-5 μm long and straight. The red colour of ocelli is produced by screening pigments that form an iris around the base of the ocellar lens and by screening pigments between the ocellar retinular cells. We discuss the organization of the compound eye rhabdom, the organization of the ocelli and the presence of a DRA in the light of what is known about Hemipteran compound eyes. We note in particular that cicadas are the only Hemipteran group with fused rhabdoms, thus making Hemiptera an interesting case to study the evolution of open rhabdoms and neural superposition.

Morphometry of eyes, antennae and wings in three species of Siagona(Coleoptera, Carabidae)

In carabid beetles, physiological and behavioural characteristics reflect specific habitat demands and there is a strong correlation between body form and habit in species with different life style. In this study, we compared the morphometry and compound eye characteristics of three species of the genus Siagona: Siagona jenissoni, Siagona dejeani and Siagona europaea. These carabids have a stenotopic lifestyle in Mediterranean clayey soils, inhabiting the ground fissure system formed during the dry season. All species have a Mediterranean distribution and are nocturnal olfactory hunters, and are strict ant predators. For morphometric measurements, we considered body length (mm), wing length (mm), antenna length (mm), head width (mm), trochanter length (mm), number of ommatidia, eye surface area (mm2), ommatidia density (number of ommatidia/mm2 of eye surface area), head height (mm), thorax height (mm) and abdomen height (mm). The data revealed intersexual and interspecific differences. The three species differ in relative length of the antennae, density and number of ommatidia and relative trochanter length. Significant differences occurred in wing sizes, which are well developed in Siagona europaea, the only species capable of flight. When eye size is compared with other ground beetles of various lifestyles, Siagona shows pronounced “microphthalmy” an adaptation to subterranean life in clayey crevices of tropical and subtropical climates with a marked dry season.