Department of Organisms and Ecosystems Research, National Institute of Biology, Večna pot 121, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Department of Biology, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Večna pot 111, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Commun Biol. 2024 Nov 19;7(1):1533. doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-07185-3.
Insects rely on substrate vibrations in numerous intra- and interspecific interactions. Yet, our knowledge of noise impact in this modality lags behind that in audition, limiting our understanding of how anthropogenic noise affects insect communities. Auditory research has linked impaired signal perception in noise (i.e., masking) to spectral overlap. We investigated the impact of noise with different spectral compositions on the vibrational communication of the stink bug Nezara viridula, examining courtship behaviour and signal representation by sensory neurons. We found negative effects of vibrational noise regardless of spectral overlap, challenging common expectations. Noise impaired the ability of males to recognize the female signal and localise its source: overlapping noise decreased sensitivity of receptor neurons to the signal and disrupted signal frequency encoding by phase-locking units, while non-overlapping noise only affected frequency encoding. Modelling neuronal spike triggering in sensory neurons linked disrupted frequency encoding to interference-induced alterations of the signal waveform. These alterations also affected time delays between signal arrivals to different legs, crucial for localisation. Our study thus unveils a new masking mechanism, potentially unique to insect vibrosensory systems. The findings highlight the higher vulnerability of vibration-mediated behaviour to noise, with implications for insect interactions in natural and anthropogenically altered environments.
昆虫在众多种内和种间相互作用中依赖于基质振动。然而，我们在这种模态中的噪声影响的知识落后于听觉，限制了我们对人为噪声如何影响昆虫群落的理解。听觉研究将噪声中受损的信号感知（即掩蔽）与光谱重叠联系起来。我们研究了具有不同光谱组成的噪声对臭虫 Nezara viridula 振动通讯的影响，检查了求偶行为和感觉神经元的信号表示。我们发现无论光谱重叠如何，振动噪声都有负面影响，这挑战了常见的预期。噪声削弱了雄性识别雌性信号和定位信号源的能力：重叠噪声降低了受体神经元对信号的敏感性，并破坏了相位锁定单元对信号频率编码，而不重叠噪声仅影响频率编码。在感觉神经元中模拟神经元尖峰触发将频率编码的中断与干扰引起的信号波形变化联系起来。这些变化还影响了不同腿部到达信号的时间延迟，这对定位至关重要。因此，我们的研究揭示了一种新的掩蔽机制，这种机制可能是昆虫振动感觉系统所特有的。这些发现强调了振动介导的行为对噪声的更高脆弱性，这对自然和人为改变的环境中的昆虫相互作用具有影响。
