| Title: |
Beyond locomotion : how specialized motor patterns enable a vertebrate to struggle free from capture |
| Authors: |
Farjami, Saeed; Palyanov, Andrey; Zhang, Hong-Yan; Saccomanno, Valentina; Merrison-Hort, Robert; Ferrario, Andrea; Borisyuk, Roman; Tabak, Joel; Li, Wen-Chang |
| Contributors: |
University of St Andrews.School of Psychology and Neuroscience; University of St Andrews.Institute of Behavioural and Neural Sciences |
| Publication Year: |
2025 |
| Collection: |
University of St Andrews: Digital Research Repository |
| Subject Terms: |
DAS |
| Description: |
This research was supported by BBSRC [Grant IDs BB/T002352/1,BB/T002549/1,BB/T003146/1,BB/X005038/1] ; Animals captured by predators can still survive the attack by struggling to release themselves. We investigated how Xenopus tadpoles use struggling movements to free themselves from head restraint. High-speed video tracking revealed a stereotyped sequence of body flexions with distinct kinematics during capture and release. We further recorded motoneuron activities along the body axis during fictive struggling to reconstruct biologically realistic spatio-temporal motoneuronal firing patterns, to drive the movement of a 3D biomechanically detailed tadpole model. Simulations showed that struggling - characterized by long-duration, low-frequency, caudorostral muscle activation - was optimized to generate freeing forces. Notably, hydrodynamic thrust alone proved insufficient for release. However, direct mechanical interactions between the tadpole’s body and the restraining object generated additional reactive forces that facilitated escape. These findings demonstrate how animals use coordinated motor outputs and body mechanics to interact with the gripping object to generate maximal freeing forces as the fundamental survival strategy. ; Peer reviewed |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| File Description: |
application/pdf |
| Language: |
English |
| Relation: |
iScience; 328811031; https://hdl.handle.net/10023/33342 |
| DOI: |
10.1101/2025.09.08.674955 |
| Availability: |
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/33342; https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.08.674955 |
| Rights: |
Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.B1D0298E |
| Database: |
BASE |