Comparative Neuromechanics

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Our long-term objective is to understand the interplay between animal size and the fundamental principles that underlie how animals move. As a consequence of their size, large and small animals are faced with very different challenges. If an elephant falls, for example, it risks grave injury, while a similar tumble for a shrew would likely be inconsequential. Despite these drastically different challenges, there is remarkable consistency in the bone cells, nerve fibres, muscle fibres and other cellular elements that comprise mammalian neuromechanical systems. This program of research seeks to quantify how these same building blocks are assembled in different sized animals, determine how these assemblies are used to accomplish the different challenges faced by small and large terrestrial animals, and understand how this ultimately constrains animal behaviour. During the full course of this research program, our vision is to tackle fundamental and important, but unanswered, biological questions such as whether large animals need prediction to control their movements, and whether the need to move constrains maximum animal size. During the term of this proposed funding, our focus will be on understanding how reaction times scale with animal size, and how this affects the control of locomotion. Towards this goal, we will employ three complementary approaches-electrophysiology experiments to quantify reaction time delays, neuromechancial modeling to study the effect of delays on performance, and behavioural experiments to test model predictions. We suspect that this work's greatest impact will be the demonstration that the nervous systems of all large terrestrial mammals must have evolved to become excellent predictive machines in order to overcome long reaction times. More generally, effective neuromuscular control is required for many tasks essential to an animal's success including locomotion, feeding and reproduction-an understanding of its relationship with size promises to provide considerable insight into mammalian behaviour, ecology and evolution.