Comparative Neuromechanics

我们的长期目标是了解动物体型和动物运动的基本原理之间的相互作用。由于体型不同，大型动物和小型动物面临着截然不同的挑战。例如，如果一头大象摔倒，它可能会受到严重伤害，而对鼩鼱来说，类似的摔倒可能无关紧要。尽管存在这些截然不同的挑战，但构成哺乳动物神经机械系统的骨细胞、神经纤维、肌肉纤维和其他细胞元素具有显著的一致性。该研究项目旨在量化这些相同的构建模块如何在不同大小的动物中组装，确定这些组件如何用于完成小型和大型陆生动物面临的不同挑战，并了解这最终如何限制动物的行为。在这项研究计划的整个过程中，我们的目标是解决基本和重要的，但尚未解决的生物学问题，如大型动物是否需要预测来控制它们的运动，以及运动的需要是否限制了动物的最大尺寸。在这项拟议的资助期内，我们的重点将放在理解反应时间如何随动物大小而变化，以及这如何影响对运动的控制。为了实现这一目标，我们将采用三种互补的方法——电生理学实验来量化反应时间延迟，神经力学建模来研究延迟对表现的影响，行为实验来测试模型预测。我们怀疑这项研究最大的影响将是证明所有大型陆生哺乳动物的神经系统必须进化成优秀的预测机器，以克服长时间的反应。更普遍的是，有效的神经肌肉控制对于动物成功的许多重要任务都是必需的，包括运动、进食和繁殖——理解它与大小的关系有望为哺乳动物的行为、生态学和进化提供相当大的见解。

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.