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Corollary discharge inhibition and audition in the stridulating cricket

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Abstract

The romantic notion of crickets singing on a warm summer’s evening is quickly dispelled when one comes ear to ear with a stridulating male. Remarkably, stridulating male crickets are able to hear sounds from the environment despite generating a 100 db song (Heiligenberg 1969; Jones and Dambach 1973). This review summarises recent work examining how they achieve this feat of sensory processing. While the responsiveness of the crickets’ peripheral auditory system (tympanic membrane, tympanic nerve, state of the acoustic spiracle) is maintained during sound production, central auditory neurons are inhibited by a feedforward corollary discharge signal precisely timed to coincide with the auditory neurons’ maximum response to self-generated sound. In this way, the corollary discharge inhibition prevents desensitisation of the crickets’ auditory pathway during sound production.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Berthold Hedwig for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by the BBSRC.

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  1. Laboratory of Sensory Processing, Brain Mind Institute, Faculty of Life Science, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, CH-1015, Switzerland

    J. F. A. Poulet

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Poulet, J.F.A. Corollary discharge inhibition and audition in the stridulating cricket. J Comp Physiol A 191, 979–986 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-005-0027-z

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