Event:

Many animals use vision to guide spatial behaviors like moving through the environment, interacting with conspecifics, predating, or performing goal-directed limb movements. In primates, a special form of binocular vision, stereoscopic vision (stereopsis), plays a pivotal role in estimating distances and depth perception. Similarly, the praying mantis, a predatory insect, uses stereopsis for distance estimation. In my talk, I will discuss my work on the visual system of praying mantises and address the question of how their stereopsis works.
The praying mantis catches prey with a rapid strike of its two front legs. It utilizes stereopsis to judge the distance of prey and decide whether the target is within reach. I study the mechanisms underlying stereoscopic vision in praying mantises using behavioral, neuroanatomical, and electrophysiological approaches. Alongside my collaborators, I developed a novel experimental paradigm that enabled us to present simple 3D movies to the animals. This approach allowed us to behaviorally scrutinize the animals’ stereo vision capabilities. From my anatomical studies, I found that the mantis’s optic lobe is highly structured with a strongly compartmentalized lobula complex. In it, I determined the activity of individual neurons with single-cell intracellular recordings while the animals were watching 3D visual stimuli on a computer screen. With this approach, I identified the first known neurons for stereopsis in invertebrates. A computational model developed for vertebrate stereopsis also describes the responses of these mantis neurons very well.
Currently, I am expanding my research on binocular vision to the genetically tractable fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and conducting functional calcium imaging on cells that are homologous to the 3D neurons found in mantises. I will provide initial insights into this approach.