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Review
Directional hearing in insects: biophysical, physiological and ecological challenges
Heiner Römer
Journal of Experimental Biology 2020 223: jeb203224 doi: 10.1242/jeb.203224 Published 30 July 2020
Heiner Römer
Institute of Biology, University of Graz, Universitätsplatz 2, 8010 Graz, Austria
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ABSTRACT

Sound localisation is a fundamental attribute of the way that animals perceive their external world. It enables them to locate mates or prey, determine the direction from which a predator is approaching and initiate adaptive behaviours. Evidence from different biological disciplines that has accumulated over the last two decades indicates how small insects with body sizes much smaller than the wavelength of the sound of interest achieve a localisation performance that is similar to that of mammals. This Review starts by describing the distinction between tympanal ears (as in grasshoppers, crickets, cicadas, moths or mantids) and flagellar ears (specifically antennae in mosquitoes and fruit flies). The challenges faced by insects when receiving directional cues differ depending on whether they have tympanal or flagellar years, because the latter respond to the particle velocity component (a vector quantity) of the sound field, whereas the former respond to the pressure component (a scalar quantity). Insects have evolved sophisticated biophysical solutions to meet these challenges, which provide binaural cues for directional hearing. The physiological challenge is to reliably encode these cues in the neuronal activity of the afferent auditory system, a non-trivial problem in particular for those insect systems composed of only few nerve cells which exhibit a considerable amount of intrinsic and extrinsic response variability. To provide an integrative view of directional hearing, I complement the description of these biophysical and physiological solutions by presenting findings on localisation in real-world situations, including evidence for localisation in the vertical plane.

Footnotes

  • Competing interests

    The author declares no competing or financial interests.

  • Funding

    The Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Austria Research Foundation (OEFG) and the Austrian Neuroscience Association (ANA) have funded my research.

  • © 2020. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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Keywords

  • Biophysics
  • Environment
  • Insect
  • Sound localisation

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Review
Directional hearing in insects: biophysical, physiological and ecological challenges
Heiner Römer
Journal of Experimental Biology 2020 223: jeb203224 doi: 10.1242/jeb.203224 Published 30 July 2020
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Review
Directional hearing in insects: biophysical, physiological and ecological challenges
Heiner Römer
Journal of Experimental Biology 2020 223: jeb203224 doi: 10.1242/jeb.203224 Published 30 July 2020

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Article navigation

  • Top
  • Article
    • ABSTRACT
    • Introduction
    • Directional hearing with antennae: mosquitoes and fruit flies
    • Sound localisation with tympanal ears: crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and parasitoid flies
    • Physiological challenges of processing small interaural differences
    • The vertical coordinate of sound localisation
    • Ecological challenges: sound localisation in the field
    • Conclusions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Footnotes
    • References
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