Maintenance of equilibrium
Active maintenance of equilibrium during bodily movement (e.g., in locomotion) requires appropriate sensory functions. Although many animals usually maintain their bodies with the long axis horizontal (backside up), humans being a notable exception, there are frequent departures from the usual position. A fish may dive steeply downward and a human may alter his or her normal orientation by lying down at full length. In no case, however, need there be any loss of equilibrium. Every deviation means an equilibrium disturbance and evokes compensatory reflex movements, not only a deviation from the usual position as in most laboratory experiments.
Maintenance of equilibrium is based upon contact of the animal with the external world; several sensory systems may play a role in this context. When an animal moves over a solid surface, tactile stimuli usually predominate as cues. It has been noted above how proprioceptors in vertebrates and arthropods can also contribute to spatial orientation; bodily tissues under gravity weigh vertically down and stimulate internal mechanoreceptors in a way that depends on, and varies with, the animal’s spatial position. When they are out of contact with the ground, many animals orient themselves in space by keeping their back (dorsal) side turned up toward the light. Visual cues also can serve equilibration; for example, through compensatory body movements (optomotor reflexes) brought about by the shifts of the image of the environment over the retina of the eye. For the receptors mentioned thus far, however, equilibration is not the unique function. There are other sensory structures that are genuine organs of equilibrium in that they primarily and exclusively serve orientation of posture and movement in space.
Gravity receptors
Because of the constancy of its magnitude and direction, gravity is most suitable in providing animals with cues to their position in space. The sense organs involved (statoreceptors) usually have the structure of a statocyst, a fluid-filled vesicle containing one or more sandy or stonelike elements (statoliths). Sensory cells in the wall of the vesicle have hairs that are in contact with the statolith, which always weighs vertically down. Hence, depending on the animal’s position, different sense cells will be stimulated in statocysts with loose statoliths, or the same sense cells will be stimulated in different ways in statocysts with a statolith loosely fixed to the sense hairs.
Statocysts are found in representatives of all of the major groups of invertebrates: jellyfish, sandworms, higher crustaceans, some sea cucumbers, free-swimming tunicate larvae, and all the mollusks studied thus far. Analogous receptors that occur generally in vertebrates are the ear’s utriculus and probably (to a degree) also two other otolith organs (sacculus and lagena) of the ear (labyrinth). Statocysts (including vertebrate labyrinthine statoreceptors) develop embryologically from local invaginations of the body surface. In primitive evolutionary forms, the interior of the statocyst is in open communication with the surrounding sea and thus is filled with water; statoliths usually are sand particles taken up from outside. In a few animal groups, this developmental stage is only found during the larval phase, the initial opening to the exterior being closed in the adult animal. In more advanced forms, the liquid content (statolymph) and the statoliths are produced by cells in the wall of the organ. This specialized type of closed statocyst is found in many snails, in all the cephalopods such as the squid (except Nautilus), and in the vast majority of vertebrates (from bony fishes up to and including mammals).
Statocyst function may be studied by observing compensatory reflexes under experimental conditions. When the position of a laboratory animal is appropriately changed, movements of such body parts as the eyes, head, and limbs can be observed. Such movements tend to counteract the imposed change and to restore or to maintain the original position. Evidence of statoreceptor function is provided if these reflexes are abolished after surgical elimination of both statocysts. Many animals exhibit locomotion that is gravitationally directed vertically down or up (positive or negative geotaxis, respectively). Geotactic behaviour may be experimentally altered by whirling the animal in a centrifuge to change the direction and to increase the intensity of the force exerted on the sensory hairs by the statoliths. Molting crustaceans shed the contents of their statocysts along with their exoskeleton. If such an animal is placed in clean water containing iron filings, it takes up new iron statoliths instead of the usual sand grains. By moving a magnet to vary the direction of the force exerted by the metal statoliths, the animal can be made to adopt any resting position, even to stay upside down. Statoliths can be washed out of the open statocysts of a shrimp without damaging the sensory hairs. When the hairs are pushed in different directions with a fine water jet, the shrimp exhibits compensatory reflexes. In this way, it has been shown that each statocyst signals a change of position around the animal’s long axis; the same reaction is found to occur after removal of the statocyst on one side only. Electrical impulses in the statocyst nerve can be recorded while the animal is in different spatial positions, or during experimental deflection of the sensory hairs. Such experiments reveal that both vertebrates and decapod crustaceans (e.g., shrimp) exhibit spontaneous and statolith-induced neural activity in the lining (epithelium) of the gravity receptor.
Spontaneous activity
The sensory epithelium of a statocyst is spontaneously active, initiating a continuing series of impulses directed toward the central nervous system (even when the statoliths are experimentally removed from the statocyst). This resting frequency of neural activity is fairly constant and completely independent of the animal’s position in space. In vertebrates and in crustaceans, spontaneous activity of the left statocyst affects the central nervous system to produce a tendency of the animal to roll to the right about its long axis; spontaneous activity of the right statocyst prompts a tendency to roll to the left. Normally, these rolling tendencies neutralize each other in the central nervous system, not becoming manifest unless the statocyst on one side of the body is functionally eliminated by complete surgical removal, by destruction of its sensory epithelium, or by cutting its nerve. This intervention permits the influence of the spontaneous activity generated in the remaining statocyst to be felt, and the animal tends to roll toward the operated side. Unilateral (one-sided) removal of the statoliths alone, however, does not produce such an effect so long as the sensory cells in the epithelium remain intact. The rolling tendency of a unilaterally operated animal usually diminishes little by little in the course of hours or days, until it finally disappears completely. If the remaining statocyst is then removed, rolling occurs again, but this time to the other (last operated) side. This tendency also diminishes and disappears with time. Apparently the unbalancing effect of the spontaneous influx from a statocyst is gradually counteracted in some unknown way by the central nervous system.
Statolith influences
Vertebrates and crustaceans have statoliths that are loosely connected to the sensory hairs by a sticky substance. With such a mechanical arrangement, the statolith stimulates the sensory cells by parallel (shearing) motion rather than by pressure or pull at right angles to the epithelium. The effects are demonstrable in experiments with fish, based on the dorsal-light orientation noted above. In a laboratory darkroom, if light shines at a fish from one side, the animal assumes an oblique position. While the fish tends to turn on its side (with its back side to the light), gravity tends to keep it vertical; the oblique position is the result. In a whirling centrifuge, the pressure exerted by the statoliths may be increased. When this is done, the fish rights itself almost precisely to the degree that the shearing force exerted by the statoliths is held constant.
In vertebrates, statoreception is localized in the head within the labyrinth, particularly within the utriculus, one of the three statolith (or otolith) organs. The statolith is surrounded by a gelatinous substance akin to the cupula of the lateral-line organs. In most higher vertebrates, the head moves rather flexibly because it is not rigidly connected to the trunk. Thus information coming from the utriculi has to be neurally integrated centrally with impulses from proprioceptors that signal the position of the head with respect to the limbs and trunk (for example, neck receptors), if the animal is to orient its head and body appropriately in space.
The roles played by the remaining otolith organs of the labyrinth (sacculus and lagena) in statoreception remain unclear. Their sensory epitheliums (maculae) are roughly at right angles to each other and to that of the utriculus. In view of their arrangement, it was once supposed that the three otolith organs of the labyrinth would serve to detect position in three spatial planes (indeed, the three semicircular canals do serve to detect rotation in different planes). It has been found, however, that the sacculus and the lagena (as far as it is present) can be put out of function bilaterally in representatives of all the classes of vertebrates without causing overt equilibration disturbances. On the other hand, some secondary statoreceptor function has been demonstrated for these otolith organs in all the animals from fish up to and including humans.
In the special case of flatfishes (e.g., halibut, sole, flounder), the normal upright position in the juvenile stage changes to one of swimming and lying on one side as an adult. The eye from that side migrates to the upper surface; but the situation of both labyrinths remains unchanged. Hence, the originally horizontal maculae of the utriculi are now oriented vertically. In these fish, the sacculi (usually the major organs of hearing in bony fishes) indeed may be shown to serve as statoreceptors. At any rate, the same otolith organ may function in one fish species as an organ of hearing and in another as a gravity receptor; clearly, both functions depend on basically identical mechanical stimulation.
As receptors belonging to the acousticolateralis system, the otolith organs of vertebrates have hair cells of the same type that is found in lateral-line neuromasts. Under the electron microscope, the sensory hair cells show a pattern of polarization throughout the macula, indicating the directions in which the shearing otolith should have an activating or an inhibiting influence. Results of physiological investigations thus far performed agree well with these deductions.
Among the invertebrates, most statocyst research has been done with such decapod crustaceans as lobsters. The working mechanism of their statocysts conforms with the physiological principles of vertebrate statoreception discussed above. The results of electrophysiological investigations support the conclusions drawn from behavioral observations. In some crustacean statocysts (for example, in the lobster, Homarus), special statoreceptors are found that signal the same bodily position differently, depending on the direction of movement through which it was reached (hysteresis effect). The part played by the statocyst in equilibration has been investigated in several other invertebrate groups, among them jellyfish, sandworms, and such mollusks as scallops, common snails, sea hare, and octopus. Each sensory cell from the vertical macula in a statocyst of the octopus bears up to 200 kinocilia, and all the cilia of each cell are polarized in the same direction. On the macula as a whole, there is a radiating polarization pattern, the activating direction pointing everywhere from the centre to the margin. Compensatory eye reflexes resulting from tilting the animal head down or head up around a transverse axis reveal a hysteresis effect. After unilateral-statocyst removal, mollusks do not tend to roll toward the operated side (as do vertebrates and crustaceans) but toward the side of the remaining statocyst.
The almost complete absence of statocysts in insects is remarkable in view of evidence that many of them have a high degree of sensitivity to the direction of gravity. Receptors involved are specialized tufts of tactile hairs at the external body surface; in the honeybee, such groups of hairs are notably found between head and thorax and between thorax and abdomen. The adaptive function of these static (gravity) receptors becomes manifest in the honeybee “dance language” performed on a vertical comb in the hive. The angle between the dancing bee and the perpendicular seems to direct other bees to sources of nectar and pollen.
Rotation receptors
In addition to having tonic statoreceptors (signalling position with respect to gravity), several groups of animals have purely phasic rotation receptors that respond only to angular acceleration or deceleration, as produced on a turntable. Vertebrates, cephalopods (e.g., squid), and decapod crustaceans (e.g., lobsters) have special rotation receptors at the inner surface of the fluid-filled organ of equilibrium (labyrinth or statocyst). This fluid lags inertially with respect to the wall of the organ at the onset and arrest of every rotation. Among crustaceans, such as crabs or lobsters, the rotation receptors incorporate relatively long, delicate hairs that extend more or less at right angles to the wall freely into the statocyst fluid. The hairs respond quickly to fluid motion, swaying around their point of attachment and returning slowly through their elasticity to resting position. Their stimulation causes compensatory reflexes of the eyestalks or of the whole animal.
Eyestalk reflexes can be readily observed when a blinded, legless crab is rotated while flat on a turntable. These reflex movements are called nystagmus. At the onset of rotation to the right, both eyestalks move at about the rotation rate to the left by way of compensation until they reach their maximal deviation. In most cases, one or more jerky movements of the eyestalks in the opposite direction are observed per rotation during the initial period (quick, restoring nystagmus phases). In general, however, the eyestalks remain deviated opposite to the direction of rotation for several revolutions of the turntable. During prolonged constant-velocity rotation, the crab’s eyestalks return to their symmetrical position; at this point, inertial lag in the statolymph is reduced to the degree that the fluid finally rotates together with the statocyst wall. Sudden arrest of the turntable under these circumstances causes afternystagmus: the eyestalks move promptly to the right (at about the same velocity as they moved to the left at the onset of rotation) until their maximal deviation toward this side is reached. After a quick jerk in the opposite direction, the eyes continue their slow movement to the right, and in this way as many as three or more after nystagmus jerks may occur with decreasing intensity. Such aftereffects may last many seconds, but finally the eyestalks return slowly to their symmetrical position. All of these nystagmic effects from such horizontal rotation are abolished in a blinded crab, however, after bilateral elimination of the long, delicate statocyst hairs by their denervation or by cauterization of the hair bases.
In vertebrates, rotation reception occurs within the labyrinth. Each labyrinth has three semicircular canals arranged in planes at right angles to each other; the canals communicate with the utriculus. One end of each canal is widened into an ampulla, and the sensory cells (hair cells) are arranged in a row on a ridge (crista) of the ampullar wall. The crista is oriented at right angles to the plane of the canal, and the extended hairs of its sensory cells are imbedded in a jellylike cupula that reaches to the opposite wall of the ampulla. Endolymph displacement through a canal makes the cupula move aside, as if it were a swinging door. In vertebrates, the inertial lag of the endolymph at the onset of rotation is very brief, the fluid catching up with the angular velocity of the labyrinth within a fraction of a second. An ampulla with its crista and cupula is reminiscent of a lateral-line canal neuromast, except that all of the hair cells of a crista are polarized in the same direction. In the cristae belonging to the vertical semicircular canals the kinocilium is implanted at the side facing the canal; in the horizontal cristae all of the sensory cells are polarized toward the opposite side (facing the utriculus). This structural arrangement is in keeping with differences between the vertical and the horizontal canals observed in behavioral and electrophysiological experiments.
A turn of the animal’s head around the vertical axis to the left increases the neural-impulse frequency (activation) in the left horizontal crista; a turn of the head to the right causes a frequency decrease (inhibition). Opposite effects occur at the same time in the right horizontal crista. Recordings from the different crista nerves, while the animal is being rotated successively around all three major body axes, show the horizontal crista to respond only to rotation of the animal around its vertical axis; the vertical cristae, however, respond to rotation about all three axes. Behavioral data (compensatory eye reflexes) provide similar results, except that the eyes fail to exhibit an observable response associated with the vertical semicircular canals during rotation around the vertical axis. Stimulation of the vertical cristae under these circumstances gives rise to the simultaneous contraction of antagonistic pairs of eye muscles; hence the absence of a compensatory eye rotation.
In decapod crustaceans, particularly crabs, the statocyst is anything but a simple spherical vesicle; it has a very complicated shape with several curved invaginations and projections. In a small corner in the lowest (most ventral) part of the crab statocyst, a cluster of minuscule sand particles (statoliths) is found in contact with specialized (hooked) hairs. Apart from these hook-hair gravity receptors, there is a single, slightly curved row of relatively straight “thread” hairs atop an oval invagination in the middle of the lower statocyst wall. These hairs are the rotation receptors described above in the blinded crab revolving on a turntable. Bilateral elimination of the thread hairs alters the reflexes of the eyestalks. Instead of reacting immediately, at the very onset of rotation, in the absence of thread hairs on both sides, the eyes initially maintain their symmetrical position. They start their compensatory movement only after rotation has begun or at the end of rotation after the animal has reached a new, steady position. Furthermore, the velocity of this compensatory eye movement seems to be independent of the rate of angular acceleration or deceleration. The delayed nature of the response suggests that loss of rotation sensitivity about horizontal axes results from thread-hair elimination.
That the thread hairs are indeed responsive to rotation about all three major body axes is supported by a number of observations. Bilateral elimination of the impulses from the statolith hairs (position receptors) by selective nerve cutting, for example, does not affect the animal’s response to rotation around the vertical axis. Despite their loss of impulses from position receptors, crabs subjected to angular acceleration or deceleration about either horizontal axis exhibit the normal compensatory eyestalk reflexes at the very onset of rotation. When a new (inclined) position of the animal is maintained, the eyestalks again become symmetrical, although complete return to symmetry may require several minutes. On the other hand, when both thread hairs and statolith hairs are eliminated, all such rotation and position reflexes of the eyestalks and related aftereffects are abolished. After unilateral elimination of the thread hairs or removal of one entire statocyst in a blinded crab, both eyes still react to rotation around the vertical axis in both directions. When electrical recordings are made of the activity of the primary sensory neurons innervating the thread hairs, similar results are obtained, the receptors responding only to angular acceleration and deceleration. They are spontaneously active, and the neural response to rotation that is superimposed upon the spontaneous background consists of a coded sequence of impulse-frequency increases and decreases. The same reception unit responds to acceleration about all three major axes.
The statocysts of cephalopods (nautilus, squid, octopus) rival the complexity of crab statocysts. In addition to the perpendicular macula with its statolith (for gravity reception), the octopus has three cristae (containing many hair cells with two-directionally polarized kinocilia) arranged approximately at right angles to each other. Rotation (turntable) experiments and surgical removal of statocyst receptors have shown that the octopus cristae function as rotation receptors. Nystagmus and afternystagmus persist almost unchanged after unilateral statocyst removal, but they are completely abolished after the additional removal of the second statocyst in a blinded octopus. In the cuttlefish (Sepia), the statocyst is structurally even more complicated; besides three cristae, it has three maculae (statolith organs) also arranged in different planes.
Rotation receptors of a different type are found in some groups of insects. Dragonflies (for example, Aeshna) have external hair receptors between the head and thorax. If a gust of wind turns the animal around its long axis during flight, the relatively heavy head lags with respect to the thorax. The resulting stimulation of the hair receptors in the neck region elicits compensatory flight reflexes and restores the insect to a normal position. These receptors do not respond to static head displacements. In the Diptera (true flies), the posterior knobbed “wings” (halteres) serve as flight stabilizing rotation receptors. During flight, the halteres beat in a vertical plane, synchronously with the forewings. Rotational instability is gyroscopically counteracted by the beating action. Receptors are campaniform sensilla at the base of the haltere.
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