Thermal effects on the performance, motor control and muscle dynamics of ballistic feeding in the salamander Eurycea guttolineata.

Temperature strongly affects muscle contractile rate properties and thus may influence whole-organism performance. Movements powered by elastic recoil, however, are known to be more thermally robust than muscle-powered movements. We examined the whole-organism performance, motor control and muscle contractile physiology underlying feeding in the salamander Eurycea guttolineata. We compared elastically powered tongue projection with the associated muscle-powered retraction to determine the thermal robustness of each of these functional levels. We found that tongue-projection distance in E. guttolineata was unaffected by temperature across the entire 4-26°C range, tongue-projection dynamics were significantly affected by temperature across only the 4-11°C interval, and tongue retraction was affected to a higher degree across the entire temperature range. The significant effect of temperature on projection dynamics across the 4-11°C interval corresponds to a significant decline in projector muscle burst intensity and peak contractile force of the projector muscle across the same interval. Across the remaining temperature range, however, projection dynamics were unaffected by temperature, with muscle contractile physiology showing typical thermal effects and motor patterns showing increased activity durations and latencies. These results reveal that elastically powered tongue-projection performance in E. guttolineata is maintained to a higher degree than muscle-powered tongue retraction performance across a wide temperature range. These results further indicate that thermal robustness of the elastically powered movement is dependent on motor control and muscle physiology that results in comparable energy being stored in elastic tissues across a range of temperatures.