Ogawa Yuri, Narendra Ajay, Hemmi Jan M
School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia.
iScience. 2022 Mar 21;25(4):104134. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104134. eCollection 2022 Apr 15.
Nocturnal insects likely have evolved distinct physiological adaptations to enhance sensitivity for tasks, such as catching moving prey, where the signal-noise ratio of visual information is typically low. Using electroretinogram recordings, we measured the impulse response and the flicker fusion frequency (FFF) in six congeneric species of ants with different diurnal rhythms. The FFF, which measures the ability of an eye to respond to a flickering light, is significantly lower in nocturnal ants (∼125 Hz) compared to diurnal ants (∼189 Hz). However, the nocturnal ants have faster eyes at very low light intensities than the diurnal species. During the day, nocturnal ants had slower impulse responses than their diurnal counterparts. However, at night, both latency and duration significantly shortened in nocturnal species. The characteristics of the impulse responses varied substantially across all six species and did not correlate well with the measured flicker fusion frequency.
夜间活动的昆虫可能已经进化出独特的生理适应性，以提高对诸如捕捉移动猎物等任务的敏感度，在这些任务中视觉信息的信噪比通常较低。通过视网膜电图记录，我们测量了六种具有不同昼夜节律的同属蚂蚁的冲动反应和闪烁融合频率（FFF）。FFF用于衡量眼睛对闪烁光的反应能力，与日间活动的蚂蚁（约189赫兹）相比，夜间活动的蚂蚁的FFF显著更低（约125赫兹）。然而，在非常低的光照强度下，夜间活动的蚂蚁的眼睛比日间活动的蚂蚁的眼睛反应更快。在白天，夜间活动的蚂蚁的冲动反应比日间活动的蚂蚁更慢。然而，在夜间，夜间活动的蚂蚁的潜伏期和持续时间都显著缩短。所有六个物种的冲动反应特征差异很大，并且与测得的闪烁融合频率没有很好的相关性。
