Roles of eyes, leg proprioceptors and statocysts in the compensatory eye movements of freely walking land crabs (Cardisoma guanhumi)

1998 ◽  
Vol 201 (24) ◽  
pp. 3395-3409
Author(s):  
H. Paul ◽  
W. J. P. Barnes ◽  
D. Varjú

The compound eyes, the canal organs of the statocysts and proprioceptors in the legs all generate compensatory eye movements in the horizontal plane in the land crab Cardisoma guanhumi. Frequency analyses of the compensatory eye reflexes elicited by each of these inputs show that visual (V) and proprioceptive (P) reflexes respond best below 0.1 Hz, while statocyst (S)reflexes only achieve a high gain above this frequency. They thus increase the range of frequencies over which compensation can occur. Eye and body movements were recorded in an arena under all possible combinations of crabs seeing or blind (V+ or V-), with or without statocysts (S+ or S-) and freely walking or passively transported on a trolley (P+ or P-). Intact crabs (V+S+P+) show good stabilisation of the eyes in space, the only movements with respect to external coordinates being saccadic resetting movements (fast phases of nystagmus). The eyes thus compensate well for body turns, but are unaffected by translatory movements of the body and turns that are not accompanied by a change in the orientation of the long axis of the body in space. In the absence of any one sense, compensation for rotation is significantly impaired, whether measured by the increase in the width of the histograms of changes in the angular positions of the eyes in space ( capdelta &phgr; E), by the mean angular velocity of the eyes(slope of regression line, mE) with respect to the angular velocity of the body (mB) or by response gain plotted against angular acceleration of body turn (a). The absence of two senses reduces the crab's ability to compensate still further, with the statocyst-only condition (V-S+P-) being little better than the condition when all three senses are absent(V-S-P-).Such multisensory control of eye compensation for body rotation is discussed both in terms of making use of every available cue for reducing retinal slip and in making available the information content of the optic flow field.

1990 ◽  
Vol 154 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. JON P. BARNES ◽  
P. Barnes

Eye movements in the horizontal plane and the rotatory component of body movement have been continuously recorded in land crabs, Cardisoma guanhumi Latreille, walking freely in an arena. The results show that the eyes compensate for locomotor turns by moving in the opposite direction to the body, thus reducing the image motion of surrounding objects on the retina. Gains often approach unity, so that stabilization of the rotatory component of self-generated image motion is good. Of the three compensatory eye reflexes that could contribute to these responses, optokinetic responses play a major role, since the gain of the responses of freely walking blinded crabs was about half that of crabs that could see. Since blinded crabs held above a ball moved their eyes whenever they rotated the ball about a vertical axis (i.e. turned), a significant role for leg proprioceptor-driven eye movements is also presumed. It is unclear whether vestibular nystagmus, driven by the statocysts, also has a role to play. In contrast to the high-gain compensatory responses that accompany turns, the translatory component of locomotion elicits compensatory eye movements only under the most favourable circumstances, when the crab walks along a runway facing a set of stripes. Even then, the responses are of very low gain (0.02-0.09). Amongst several possible factors, this is partly because lateral ommatidia, which drive the optokinetic responses, will face the poles of the flow field during sideways walking, and partly because stationary contrasts (as occur at the poles of the flow field) reduce the gain of optokinetic responses. It is argued that, by compensating for turns but not translatory locomotor movements, crabs effectively separate the rotatory from the translatory components of the visual flow field around them. Since only the former can be used in course control, while only the latter provides information on ground speed and the three-dimensional layout of the environment, such a separation makes good functional sense.


2001 ◽  
Vol 204 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Copp ◽  
M. Jamon

The kinematic patterns of defense turning behavior in freely behaving specimens of the crayfish Procambarus clarkii were investigated with the aid of a video-analysis system. Movements of the body and all pereiopods, except the chelipeds, were analyzed. Because this behavior approximates to a rotation in place, this analysis extends previous studies on straight and curve walking in crustaceans. Specimens of P. clarkii responded to a tactile stimulus on a walking leg by turning accurately to face the source of the stimulation. Angular velocity profiles of the movement of the animal's carapace suggest that defense turn responses are executed in two phases: an initial stereotyped phase, in which the body twists on its legs and undergoes a rapid angular acceleration, followed by a more erratic phase of generally decreasing angular velocity that leads to the final orientation. Comparisons of contralateral members of each pair of legs reveal that defense turns are affected by changes in step geometry, rather than by changes in the timing parameters of leg motion, although inner legs 3 and 4 tend to take more steps than their outer counterparts during the course of a response. During the initial phase, outer legs 3 and 4 exhibit larger stance amplitudes than their inner partners, and all the outer legs produce larger stance amplitudes than their inner counterparts during the second stage of the response. Also, the net vectors of the initial stances, particularly, are angled with respect to the body, with the power strokes of the inner legs produced during promotion and those of the outer legs produced during remotion. Unlike straight and curve walking in the crayfish, there is no discernible pattern of contralateral leg coordination during defense turns. Similarities and differences between defense turns and curve walking are discussed. It is apparent that rotation in place, as in defense turns, is not a simple variation on straight or curve walking but a distinct locomotor pattern.


Author(s):  
Linda Maddock ◽  
J. Z. Young

The shapes and dimensions of the statocysts of cephalopods have been measured and compared with the semi-circular canals of vertebrates. The cavities grow much more slowly than the body as a whole, but there are knobs, anticristae, which restrict the cavity, and these grow relatively faster. This ensures that the flow of endolymph across the cupulae remains small. Where the liquid is constrained within canals the radius of curvature of the whole canal, R, is similar to that of fishes, whereas its internal radius, r, is twice as large in non-buoyant and four times as large in deep-sea buoyant cephalopods as in fishes of similar size. As in fishes the restriction is greatest in the horizontal plane, providing for operation at higher frequencies in turning about the yaw axis.The statocysts of seven species of Loligo all have similar proportions. The largest individuals of 16 genera of non-buoyant squids also have these same relative dimensions. The statocyst of Sepia is more like that of non-buoyant than of other buoyant cephalopods but yet differs significantly from that of Loligo at all sizes. On the other hand 21 genera of squids known to be neutrally buoyant are very different. Their statocysts are often larger than in the non-buoyant forms and there is less restriction of the cavity by anticristae. The greater flow of endolymph acting across the cupulae presumably provides greater sensitivity at the lower frequencies of turning of these deep-sea animals.The data suggest that the cristae of the cephalopod statocyst may operate in the frequency band where they act as angular accelerometers whereas the vertebrate semi-circular canals operate at higher frequencies as angular velocity meters.


1987 ◽  
Vol 109 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Angeles

The computation of the angular acceleration of a rigid body from measurements of accelerations of three noncollinear points of the body is presented in this paper. This is based on algorithms presented previously for the computation of the orientation and the angular velocity of a rigid body from measurements of position and velocity of three noncollinear points of the body. Moreover, compatibility conditions that the said point measurements should verify are introduced. These are necessary to verify the rigidity assumption on the one hand; on the other hand, they are introduced as a means of filtering roundoff and/or measurement errors, which is particularly useful if redundant measurements are taken, i.e., on more than three points. The procedure is illustrated with a fully solved example.


Author(s):  
Thomas R. Williams ◽  
Donald W. Raboud ◽  
Ken R. Fyfe

It is well established that it is necessary to use a minimum of six accelerometers to determine the general motion of a rigid body. Using this minimum number of accelerometers generally requires that a nonlinear differential equation be solved for the angular velocity and that the estimate of angular velocity that is obtained from the solution of this equation be used in the calculation of the specific force at a point. This paper serves two main purposes. First it discusses, for the first time, the geometric conditions that must be satisfied by an arrangement of six accelerometers so that it is possible, in principle, to determine the motion of the body to which they are attached. Second, a special class of minimal accelerometer configurations that yields angular acceleration as a linear combination of accelerometer measurements is identified, and a design methodology for this special class is presented.


2013 ◽  
Vol 76 (7) ◽  
pp. 1270-1273 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSS PETERSON ◽  
HARRY HARIHARAN ◽  
VANESSA MATTHEW ◽  
SAM CHAPPELL ◽  
ROB DAVIES ◽  
...  

Samples of intestine and hepatopancreas from 65 blue land crabs (Cardisoma guanhumi), a crustacean commonly consumed as a food item in Grenada, were collected from six geographic sites in Grenada and tested for Salmonella by enrichment and selective culture. The individual animal prevalence of Salmonella based on isolation was 17% (11 of 65), and all infected crabs were from three of the six sampled locations. Isolates were identified by serotyping as Salmonella enterica serovars Saintpaul (n = 6), Montevideo (n = 4), and Newport (n = 1). The intestines of all 11 infected crabs were positive for Salmonella, but only 7 of 11 hepatopancreas samples were positive for Salmonella, and these isolates were the same serovar as isolated from the matching intestine. These three Salmonella serovars are known to cause human illness in many countries, and in the Caribbean Salmonella Saintpaul has been frequently isolated from humans. In a disc diffusion assay, all isolates were susceptible to all 11 drugs tested: amoxicillin–clavulanic acid, ampicillin, cephalothin, chloramphenicol, ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, imipenem, neomycin, streptomycin, tetracycline, and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. To our knowledge, this report is the first concerning isolation and antimicrobial susceptibilities of Salmonella serotypes from the blue land crab.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 895-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
AARON P. JOHNSON ◽  
W. JON. P. BARNES ◽  
MARTIN W.S. MACAULEY

Using a novel suite of computer-generated visual stimuli that mimicked components of optic flow, the visual responses of the tropical land crab,Cardisoma guanhumi, were investigated. We show that crabs are normally successful in distinguishing the rotational and translational components of the optic flow field, showing strong optokinetic responses to the former but not the latter. This ability was not dependant on the orientation of the crab, occurring both in “forwards-walking” and “sideways-walking” configurations. However, under conditions of low overall light intensity and/or low object/background contrast, the separation mechanism shows partial failure causing the crab to generate compensatory eye movements to translation, particularly in response to low-frequency (low-velocity) stimuli. Using this discovery, we then tested the ability of crabs to separate rotational and translational components in a combined rotation/translation flow field under different conditions. We demonstrate that, while crabs can successfully separate such a combined flow field under normal circumstances, showing compensatory eye movements only to the rotational component, they are unable to make this separation under conditions of low overall light intensity and low object/background contrast. Here, the responses to both flow-field components show summation when they are in phase, but, surprisingly, there is little reduction in the amplitude of responses to rotation when the translational component is in antiphase. Our results demonstrate that the crab's visual system finds separation of flow-field components a harder task than detection of movement, since the former shows partial failure at light intensities and/or object/background contrasts at which movement of the world around the crab is still generating high-gain optokinetic responses.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 905-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
AARON P. JOHNSON ◽  
W. JON. P. BARNES ◽  
MARTIN W.S. MACAULEY

Although a number of global mechanisms have been proposed over the years that explain how crabs might separate the rotational and translational components of their optic flow field, there has been no evidence to date that local mechanisms such as motion parallax are used in this separation. We describe here a study that takes advantage of a recently developed suite of computer-generated visual stimuli that creates a three-dimensional world surrounding the crab in which we can simulate translational and rotational optic flow. We show that, while motion parallax is not the only mechanism used in flow-field separation, it does play a role in the recognition of translational optic flow fields in that, under conditions of low overall light intensity and low contrast ratio when crabs find the distinction between rotation and translation harder, smaller eye movements occur in response to translation when motion parallax cues are present than when they are absent. Thus, motion parallax is one of many cues that crabs use to separate rotational and translational optic flow by showing compensatory eye movements to only the former.


Author(s):  
Sung-Soo Kim ◽  
Bongcheol Seo ◽  
Myungho Kim

In this paper, mixed kinetic-kinematic equations for a multibody system have been studied in order to resolve the difficulties of non-integrability of angular velocity vectors. As for the kinetic equations, the Newton-Euler equations of motion are considered. They are derived in terms of angular velocity and angular acceleration vectors expressed in the body fixed reference frames. As for the kinematic compatibility equations, two different equations are considered. One is from the relationship between the angular velocity vector and the time derivatives of Euler parameters. The other is from the relationship between the rotational orientation matrix, its time derivative, and the angular velocity vector. In order to investigate the accuracy of the solution methods using two different kinematic compatibility equations, simulations of a spherical pendulum model and a 1/6 robot vehicle model have been carried out. With different integration step-sizes, the constraint violation errors have been also investigated.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document