"Female honeybees use the “waggle dance” to communicate the location of nectar sources to their hive mates. Distance information is encoded in the duration of the waggle phase (von Frisch, 1967). During the waggle phase, the dancer produces trains of vibration pulses, which are detected by the follower bees via Johnston's organ located on the antennae. To uncover the neural mechanisms underlying the encoding of distance information in the waggle dance follower, we investigated morphology, physiology, and immunohistochemistry of interneurons arborizing in the primary auditory center of the honeybee (Apis mellifera). We identified major interneuron types, named DL-Int-1, DL-Int-2, and bilateral DL-dSEG-LP, that responded with different spiking patterns to vibration pulses applied to the antennae. Experimental and computational analyses suggest that inhibitory connection plays a role in encoding and processing the duration of vibration pulse trains in the primary auditory center of the honeybee."
Model Type: Realistic Network
Cell Type(s): Abstract integrate-and-fire adaptive exponential (AdEx) neuron
Model Concept(s): Invertebrate; Activity Patterns; Audition
Simulation Environment: Brian 2 (web link to model)
References:
Ai H, Kai K, Kumaraswamy A, Ikeno H, Wachtler T. (2017). Interneurons in the Honeybee Primary Auditory Center Responding to Waggle Dance-Like Vibration Pulses. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience. 37 [PubMed]