Electrophysiology Meets Ecology: Investigating How Vision is Tuned to the Life Style of an Animal using Electroretinography.

ABSTRACT: Students learn best when projects are multidisciplinary, hands-on, and provide ample opportunity for self-driven investigation. We present a teaching unit that leads students to explore relationships between sensory function and ecology. Field studies, which are rare in neurobiology education, are combined with laboratory experiments that assess visual properties of insect eyes, using electroretinography (ERG). Comprised of nearly one million species, insects are a diverse group of animals, living in nearly all habitats and ecological niches. Each of these lifestyles puts different demands on their visual systems, and accordingly, insects display a wide array of eye organizations and specializations. Physiologically relevant differences can be measured using relatively simple extracellular

SUBMITTER: Stowasser A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4521742 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature