Review
Version 1
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Neuroscience Needs Ethology: The Marked Example of the Moth Pheromone System
Version 1
: Received: 15 July 2020 / Approved: 16 July 2020 / Online: 16 July 2020 (13:21:38 CEST)
How to cite: Thevenon, H. Neuroscience Needs Ethology: The Marked Example of the Moth Pheromone System. Preprints 2020, 2020070357. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0357.v1 Thevenon, H. Neuroscience Needs Ethology: The Marked Example of the Moth Pheromone System. Preprints 2020, 2020070357. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0357.v1
Abstract
The key premise of translational studies is that knowledge gained in one animal species can be transposed to other animals. So far translational bridges have mainly relied on genetic and physiological similarities, in experimental setups where behaviours and environment are often oversimplified. These simplifications were recently criticised for decreasing the intrinsic value of the published results. The inclusion of wild behaviour and rich environments in neuroscience experimental designs is difficult to achieve because no animal model has it all. As an example, the genetic toolkit of moths species is virtually non-existent when compared to C. elegans, rats, mice, or zebrafish, however the balance is reversed for wild behaviours. The ethological knowledge gathered about the moth was instrumental for designing natural-like auditory stimuli, that were used in association with electrophysiology in order to understand how moths use these variable sounds produced by their predators in order to trump death. Conversely, we are still stuck with understanding how male moths make sense of their complex and diffuse olfactory landscape in order to locate conspecific females up to several hundred meters away, and precisely identify a conspecific in a sympatric swarm in order to reproduce. This systemic review articulates the ethological knowledge pertaining to this unresolved problem and leverages the paradigm to gain insight into how male moths process sparse and uncertain environmental sensory information.
Keywords
moth; pheromone; noctuid
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Insect Science
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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