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Collision-course science: when a single locust joins a swarm

March 26, 2003

If an animal is to cope with changing environmental conditions, activity in its nervous system must also change. Scientists from Cambridge and Oxford are studying these changes in collision-detecting nerve cells in the visual system of the locust, an insect that alternates between two lifestyles. Their research, to be presented at the SEB conference on Wednesday 2 April, may help in the design of artificial collision sensors, and may even find ways to prevent locusts from swarming.

Contrary to popular belief, locusts aren't always the crop-devouring pests we perceive them to be. Most of the time they adopt a solitary lifestyle so that "finding a locust in the deserts of North Africa is usually very difficult!" explains Dr Tom Matheson (Cambridge). However, when food and weather conditions are right, locusts can be forced together and undergo changes which cause them to aggregate into voracious swarms of vast proportions.

Matheson and his colleagues are especially interested in the locust's collision-detecting nerve cells. Normally these help the locust to take evasive action. So how do these cells cope with the demands posed by the different lifestyles of solitary and swarming locusts?

The researchers have discovered that the collision detectors in swarming locusts are able to predict collisions reliably, even if they are faced with many objects approaching one after another. However, the same nerve cell in solitary locusts stops responding after it has encountered only one or two such objects. This change may help the locust cope with the visual demands of life in a dense swarm where collisions are more likely.

Matheson's team hope to continue investigating how the locust nervous system changes as a result of environmental conditions. Their research may also have other applications - "if we can understand the cues that cause solitarious locusts to become gregarious we may be able to develop ways of preventing this change and thus preventing swarm formation", says Matheson, "our work on plasticity in the visual system might also suggest ways in which artificial visual sensors should be designed to function differently in different visual processing tasks".

Society for Experimental Biology