Responses of central auditory neurons of female crickets (Gryllus campestris L.) to the calling song of the male

Summary This paper reports the results of studies on the neural control of the female's phonotactic response to the calling song of a male cricket, Gryllus campestris L. It deals with the processing of acoustic information contained in the temporal organization of the male's calling song by central auditory neurons. Suction electrodes were used to record the activity of auditory neurons within the intact or within splitted cervical connectives in response to the playback of a natural calling song, or to artificial chirps.Several non-habituating auditory units were repeatedly encountered as a group. These units showed clear, consistent but complex responses to the male's calling song. Individual neurons were identified that responded consistently to either the chirps as a unit (chirp coder) or to the individual pulses within a chirp (pulse coder).Auditory neurons variably responsive to the temporal features of the calling song were also observed, and the most interesting units of this group answered cyclically to the calling song with a period approximating that of the respiratory rate and perhaps that of the slow oscillator suggested by Kutsch (1969) as a timer of the chirp sequences in the male.The results demonstrate that all important temporal features of the calling song in Gryllus campestris L. are coded in the activity of a few central auditory neurons which carry this information to the head ganglia.This research was supported by an U.S.P.H.S. Special Fellowship (MH 1244) and by U.S.P.H.S. Research Grant N.S. 08732 given to J. F. Stout, and it was sponsored by a Nato-Research Grant No. 512, a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and, the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, given to F. Huber.