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In physiology, nociception, also nocioception; from Latin nocere 'to harm/hurt') is the sensory nervous system's process of encoding noxious stimuli. It deals with a series of events and processes required for an organism to receive a painful stimulus, convert it to a molecular signal, and recognize and characterize the signal to trigger an appropriate defensive response.
Halteres are a pair of small club-shaped organs on the body of two orders of flying insects that provide information about body rotations during flight. Insects of the large order Diptera (flies) have halteres which evolved from a pair of ancestral hindwings, while males of the much smaller order Strepsiptera (stylops) have halteres which evolved from a pair of ancestral forewings.
Termites are a group of detritophagous eusocial insects which consume a wide variety of decaying plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, and soil humus. They are distinguished by their moniliform antennae and the soft-bodied and often unpigmented worker caste for which they have been commonly termed "white ants"; however, they are not ants, to which they are distantly related. About 2,972 extant species are currently described, 2,105 of which are members of the family Termitidae.
In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a stimulus.
Wolbachia is a genus of intracellular bacteria that infects mainly arthropod species, including a high proportion of insects, and also some nematodes. It is one of the most common parasitic microbes, and is possibly the most common reproductive parasite in the biosphere. Its interactions with its hosts are often complex, and in some cases have evolved to be mutualistic rather than parasitic. Some host species cannot reproduce, or even survive, without Wolbachia colonisation. One study concluded that more than 16% of neotropical insect species carry bacteria of this genus, and as many as 25 to 70% of all insect species are estimated to be potential hosts.
Transient receptor potential channels are a group of ion channels located mostly on the plasma membrane of numerous animal cell types. Most of these are grouped into two broad groups: Group 1 includes TRPC, TRPV, TRPVL, TRPM, TRPS, TRPN TRPA. Group 2 consists of TRPP and TRPML. Other less-well categorized TRP channels exist, including yeast channels and a number of Group 1 and Group 2 channels present in non-animals. Many of these channels mediate a variety of sensations such as pain, temperature, different kinds of tastes, pressure, and vision. In the body, some TRP channels are thought to behave like microscopic thermometers and used in animals to sense hot or cold. Some TRP channels are activated by molecules found in spices like garlic (allicin), chili pepper (capsaicin), wasabi ; others are activated by menthol, camphor, peppermint, and cooling agents; yet others are activated by molecules found in cannabis or stevia. Some act as sensors of osmotic pressure, volume, stretch, and vibration. Most of the channels are activated or inhibited by signaling lipids and contribute to a family of lipid-gated ion channels.
Octopamine (molecular formula C8H11NO2; also known as OA, and also norsynephrine, para-octopamine and others) is an organic chemical closely related to norepinephrine, and synthesized biologically by a homologous pathway. Octopamine is often considered the major "fight-or-flight" neurohormone of invertebrates. Its name is derived from the fact that it was first identified in the salivary glands of the octopus.
In cellular biology, mechanotransduction is any of various mechanisms by which cells convert mechanical stimulus into electrochemical activity. This form of sensory transduction is responsible for a number of senses and physiological processes in the body, including proprioception, touch, balance, and hearing. The basic mechanism of mechanotransduction involves converting mechanical signals into electrical or chemical signals.
Campaniform sensilla are a class of mechanoreceptors found in insects, which respond to local stress and strain within the animal's cuticle. Campaniform sensilla function as proprioceptors that detect mechanical load as resistance to muscle contraction, similar to mammalian Golgi tendon organs. Sensory feedback from campaniform sensilla is integrated in the control of posture and locomotion.
Plant perception is the ability of plants to sense and respond to the environment by adjusting their morphology and physiology. Botanical research has revealed that plants are capable of reacting to a broad range of stimuli, including chemicals, gravity, light, moisture, infections, temperature, oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations, parasite infestation, disease, physical disruption, sound, and touch. The scientific study of plant perception is informed by numerous disciplines, such as plant physiology, ecology, and molecular biology.
TRPA is a family of transient receptor potential ion channels. The TRPA family is made up of 7 subfamilies: TRPA1, TRPA- or TRPA1-like, TRPA5, painless, pyrexia, waterwitch, and HsTRPA. TRPA1 is the only subfamily widely expressed across animals, while the other subfamilies are largely absent in deuterostomes.
Scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) is a type of scanning probe microscopy that maps the local temperature and thermal conductivity of an interface. The probe in a scanning thermal microscope is sensitive to local temperatures – providing a nano-scale thermometer. Thermal measurements at the nanometer scale are of both scientific and industrial interest. The technique was invented by Clayton C. Williams and H. Kumar Wickramasinghe in 1986.
Biotic stress is stress that occurs as a result of damage done to an organism by other living organisms, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, beneficial and harmful insects, weeds, and cultivated or native plants. It is different from abiotic stress, which is the negative impact of non-living factors on the organisms such as temperature, sunlight, wind, salinity, flooding and drought. The types of biotic stresses imposed on an organism depend the climate where it lives as well as the species' ability to resist particular stresses. Biotic stress remains a broadly defined term and those who study it face many challenges, such as the greater difficulty in controlling biotic stresses in an experimental context compared to abiotic stress.
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of stimuli. Although in some cultures five human senses were traditionally identified as such, many more are now recognized. Senses used by non-human organisms are even greater in variety and number. During sensation, sense organs collect various stimuli for transduction, meaning transformation into a form that can be understood by the brain. Sensation and perception are fundamental to nearly every aspect of an organism's cognition, behavior and thought.
Pain in invertebrates is a contentious issue. Although there are numerous definitions of pain, almost all involve two key components. First, nociception is required. This is the ability to detect noxious stimuli which evokes a reflex response that moves the entire animal, or the affected part of its body, away from the source of the stimulus. The concept of nociception does not necessarily imply any adverse, subjective feeling; it is a reflex action. The second component is the experience of "pain" itself, or suffering—i.e., the internal, emotional interpretation of the nociceptive experience. Pain is therefore a private, emotional experience. Pain cannot be directly measured in other animals, including other humans; responses to putatively painful stimuli can be measured, but not the experience itself. To address this problem when assessing the capacity of other species to experience pain, argument-by-analogy is used. This is based on the principle that if a non-human animal's responses to stimuli are similar to those of humans, it is likely to have had an analogous experience. It has been argued that if a pin is stuck in a chimpanzee's finger and they rapidly withdraw their hand, then argument-by-analogy implies that like humans, they felt pain. It has been questioned why the inference does not then follow that a cockroach experiences pain when it writhes after being stuck with a pin. This argument-by-analogy approach to the concept of pain in invertebrates has been followed by others.
Haller's organ is a complex sensory organ possessed by hard and soft ticks. Not found outside of Acari, it is proposed to function like the chemosensation of insect antennae, but is structurally different. Ticks, being obligate parasites, must find a host in order to survive. Bloodmeals are necessary for completion of the life cycle, including reproduction and ontogenetic development. First described in 1881, it was named for its discoverer, Haller. While Haller initially proposed it was involved in auditory sensation, this was rejected in favor of olfactory sensation by 1905. This theory was supported by Lee's behavioral studies as early as 1948.
The transient receptor potential Ca2+ channel (TRP-CC) family (TC# 1.A.4) is a member of the voltage-gated ion channel (VIC) superfamily and consists of cation channels conserved from worms to humans. The TRP-CC family also consists of seven subfamilies (TRPC, TRPV, TRPM, TRPN, TRPA, TRPP, and TRPML) based on their amino acid sequence homology:
- the canonical or classic TRPs,
- the vanilloid receptor TRPs,
- the melastatin or long TRPs,
- ankyrin (whose only member is the transmembrane protein 1 [TRPA1])
- TRPN after the nonmechanoreceptor potential C (nonpC), and the more distant cousins,
- the polycystins
- and mucolipins.
Soft robotics is a subfield of robotics that concerns the design, control, and fabrication of robots composed of compliant materials, instead of rigid links. In contrast to rigid-bodied robots built from metals, ceramics and hard plastics, the compliance of soft robots can improve their safety when working in close contact with humans.
Insect cognition describes the mental capacities and study of those capacities in insects. The field developed from comparative psychology where early studies focused more on animal behavior. Researchers have examined insect cognition in bees, fruit flies, and wasps.
A descending neuron is a neuron that conveys signals from the brain to neural circuits in the spinal cord (vertebrates) or ventral nerve cord (invertebrates). As the sole conduits of information between the brain and the body, descending neurons play a key role in behavior. Their activity can initiate, maintain, modulate, and terminate behaviors such as locomotion. Because the number of descending neurons is several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of neurons in either the brain or spinal cord/ventral nerve cord, this class of cells represents a critical bottleneck in the flow of information from sensory systems to motor circuits.
References
- ↑ Tichy, H; Kallina, W (June 2010). "Insect hygroreceptor responses to continuous changes in humidity and air pressure". Journal of neurophysiology. 103 (6): 3274–86. doi:10.1152/jn.01043.2009. PMC 3206210 . PMID 20375249.
- ↑ Rivers DB, Dahlem GA (2014). The Science of Forensic Entomology. EBL-Schweitzer. Wiley. p. 157. ISBN 978-1-119-94036-4 . Retrieved 20 October 2018.
- ↑ Enjin A, Zaharieva EE, Frank DD, Mansourian S, Suh GS, Gallio M, Stensmyr MC (May 2016). "Humidity Sensing in Drosophila". Current Biology. 26 (10): 1352–1358. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.049. PMC 5305172 . PMID 27161501.
- ↑ Tichy H, Kallina W (16 January 2013). "Evaporative Function of Cockroach Hygroreceptors". PLOS ONE. 8 (1): e53998. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...853998T. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053998 . PMC 3546976 . PMID 23342058.
- ↑ Russell J, Vidal-Gadea AG, Makay A, Lanam C, Pierce-Shimomura JT (June 2014). "Humidity sensation requires both mechanosensory and thermosensory pathways in Caenorhabditis elegans". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 111 (22): 8269–8274. Bibcode:2014PNAS..111.8269R. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1322512111 . PMC 4050571 . PMID 24843133.
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