Dokument

Summary:
Many insect species demonstrate sophisticated abilities regarding spatial orientation and navigation, despite their small brain size. The behaviors that are based on spatial orientation differ dramatically between individual insect species according to their lifestyle and habitat. Central place foragers like bees and ants, for example, orient themselves in their surrounding and navigate back to the nest after foraging for food or water. Insects like some locust and butterfly species, on the other hand, use spatial orientation during migratory phases to keep a stable heading into a certain direction over a long period of time. In both scenarios, homing and long-distance migration, vision is the primary source for orientation cues even though additional features like wind direction, the earth’s magnetic field, and olfactory cues can be taken into account as well. Visual cues that are used for orientational purposes range from landmarks and the panorama to celestial cues. The latter consists in diurnal insects of the position of the sun itself, the sun-based polarization pattern and intensity and spectral gradient, and is summarized as sky-compass system. For a reliable sky-compass orientation, the animal needs, in addition to the perception of celestial cues, to compensate for the daily movement of the sun across the sky. It is likely that a connection from the circadian pacemaker system to the sky-compass network could provide the necessary circuitry for this time compensation. The present thesis focuses on the sky-compass system of honeybees and locusts. There is a large body of work on the navigational abilities of honeybees from a behavioral perspective but the underlying neuronal anatomy and physiology has received less attention so far. Therefore, the first two chapters of this thesis reveals a large part of the anatomy of the anterior sky-compass pathway in the bee brain. To this end, dye injections, immunohistochemical stainings, and ultrastructural examinations were conducted. The third chapter describes a novel methodical protocol for physiological investigations of neurons involved in the sky-compass system using calcium imaging in behaving animals. The fourth chapter of this thesis deals with the anatomical basis of time compensation in the sky-compass system of locusts. Therefore, the ultrastructure of synaptic connections in a brain region of the desert locust where the contact of both systems could be feasible has been investigated.

Das Dokument ist im Internet frei zugänglich - Hinweise zu den Nutzungsrechten