Comparative Neuromechanics

我们的长期目标是了解动物的大小和动物运动的基本原理之间的相互作用。由于体型庞大，大型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，它可能会受到重伤，而类似的摔倒对于一只地鼠来说可能是微不足道的。尽管有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。这项研究计划试图量化这些相同的积木是如何在不同大小的动物身上组装的，确定如何利用这些组装来完成小型和大型陆地动物面临的不同挑战，并了解这最终如何限制动物的行为。在这个研究计划的整个过程中，我们的愿景是解决基本的和重要的但尚未回答的生物学问题，例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。在这项拟议的资金期限内，我们的重点将是了解反应时间如何与动物的大小成比例，以及这如何影响运动的控制。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，神经机械建模来研究延迟对性能的影响，以及行为实验来测试模型预测。我们怀疑，这项工作最大的影响将是证明，所有大型陆地哺乳动物的神经系统必须进化成优秀的预测机器，才能克服长反应时间。更广泛地说，许多对动物的成功至关重要的任务都需要有效的神经肌肉控制，包括运动、摄食和繁殖--了解它与大小的关系有望为哺乳动物的行为、生态和进化提供相当大的洞察力。

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.