When competition is high, life can depend on making the right choice between fighting or fleeing. How this is done has now been revealed – at least in field crickets, which use brain chemicals that signal potential costs and benefits of fighting to lower or raise their tendency to flee.
By Paul A. Stevenson
Charles Darwin recognised that the struggle for existence was most severe between males of the same species. After all, they compete for the same foods, sexual partners and territory. Although there’s much to be won, fighting bears the risk of injury and losing life or limb. Hence, for aggression to be of any advantage, and even to have evolved in the first place, animals must somehow weigh up the potential costs and benefits to decide when to fight, or when it may be wiser to flee. Although much of how animals do this is still a mystery, researchers from Leipzig University in Germany have uncovered the secret in field crickets by manipulating brain chemicals and sensory information exchanged during fighting.
Why crickets?
“Well, for one”, says Paul Stevenson, who led the study with Jan Rillich, “cricket fights are spectacular and easily quantified, but more importantly their less complex brains make decisions instinctively, that is without conscious reasoning, and are accordingly easier to investigate”. The researchers first found that positive experiences, such as possession of a valuable resource, recruits the brain chemical octopamine (the insect equivalent of noradrenaline), which increases their tendency to keep fighting. In effect, octopamine raises their threshold to flee – or basically the amount of punishment a cricket is prepared to endure.
Crickets fighting © Jan Rillich
During a fight then, crickets add up the sensory impact of their opponents actions (threats, bites etc.) and flee when the critical threshold is reached. This occurs due to the release of nitric oxide (NO), which gives the command. NO, in turn, recruits the messenger molecule serotonin, which causes losers to behave submissively for some time after fighting. Intriguingly, the same types of brain chemicals also influence aggression in mammals, including man, but their natural roles in controlling the decision to fight or flee is still unclear. Stevenson’s team in Leipzig currently investigates the effects of repeated, intermittent defeats, which induces depression like symptoms in man, mice, and apparently also crickets.
Read the original article, published in the journal Neuroforum, here:
Paul A. Stevenson, Jan Rillich: Fight or flee? Lessons from insects on aggression, 12.12.2018.
