最新糖心Vlog

最新糖心Vlog of Adelaide researchers and collaborators from Lund 最新糖心Vlog in Sweden have made a breakthrough in understanding how dragonflies' brains work.

The team, including PhD candidate Mahdi Hussaini and Associate Professor Steven Wiederman from the 最新糖心Vlog of Adelaide's School of Biomedicine, analysed the impact of temperature on the dragonfly鈥檚 ability to perceive the world.

The findings have now been published in the journal .

"Dragonflies are poikilothermic animals with limited thermoregulation, which means the temperature of their entire bodies, including their brains, vary and change throughout the day," said Mr Hussaini, who was also the paper's lead author.

"They have the ability to chase prey successfully whether in sunlight or under cloud cover, most likely due to small target motion detector (STMD) neurons in the visual pathway of a dragonfly's brain.鈥�

"These neurons are sensitive to target contrast, and are tuned to the target's size and velocity, but increased temperatures dramatically change the neuron鈥檚 sensitivity and speed."

Dragonflies are apex predators and are highly evolved to chase small prey in cluttered scenes, with researchers using brain recordings to develop neuro-inspired, computational models for target-tracking applications.

This includes artificial vision systems that detect fast moving, aerial drones from autonomous vehicles.

鈥淚nspiration from biology helps us to provide solutions to engineering problems from a different perspective,鈥� said Associate Professor Wiederman.

鈥淕iven the biology rapidly changes in response to external factors like temperature, we need to understand what role this plays in information processing.

"How the dragonfly brain interprets this changing information, to still provide a robust perception of what they see (and interact with) will be an intriguing avenue of future research, from both biological and engineering perspectives."

Associate Professor Wiederman said until now, no one understood how large the impact of external factors (like daily changes in temperature) is on the dragonfly鈥檚 perception of the world (via changes in neurons鈥� spiking activity).

Across a range of increasing temperatures, often experienced by a dragonfly on a summer鈥檚 day, STMD neurons had an almost nine-fold increase in sensitivity to small moving targets.

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