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How Flying Bees Pilot, and other arthropod wonders

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After publishing, with Ted Bullock, the two-volume work on Invertebrate Neurobiology, in 1962 Adrian selected a new topic, and built up a group at St Andrews (and later at the Australian National University), specializing in the optics, neuron anatomy and electrophysiology of the arthropod compound eye, which offered a wide variety of topics. Neuron anatomy of insect visual systems was a classical study in the early 20th century, but yielded few explanations of how nerve cells, fibres, and their connections could explain anything. The electrophysiology began in mid-century as a novelty and generated a great deal of interesting biophysics of neurons, and their membranes and synapses (useful for medical sciences), but few explanations of the origin of behavioural patterns. The problem was that recordings were of the activity, but the meanings of the messages in the neurons were not revealed except in the peripheral sensory systems. By 1990, interest had shifted to the perception of colour and recognition of place by the honeybee, which is easily trained to return to a target. This analysis revealed a small number of responsible feature detectors that together revealed the nature of the messages, but not which neurons were active. However, we could explain how honeybees recognize, distinguish, and learn places, including foraging places. The final step, which is now progressively rolled out in this account of recent discoveries, is the innate detection and analysis of the honeybee's own three-dimensional surroundings, without reward, to detect the positions of surrounding objects from the relative motions caused by parallax as the bees themselves move in flight. This leads to an explanation of the amazing resolution and vast number of axes of the insect eye. These results further illustrate the advantage of sticking on one natural system or family of research efforts, and become deeply embedded in related topics, because it takes a persistent effort to understand the antiintuitive natural world. More information is available on my website: www.adrian-horridge.org

Weniger Details

Born 1927, after wartime schooling, then 4 years as a scholar at St John's College, Cambridge, Adrian spent 10 years working out details of nervous systems and nervous control of movement in the phylum Coelenterata, including jellyfish, medusae, and corals, and also Ctenophores. There followed a year at the Center for Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, with Ted Bullock, writing a huge two-volume work on Invertebrate Nervous Systems (1965).When Adrian returned to St. Andrews, Scotland, he had decided to concentrate on all aspects of the arthropod compound eye. His first students recorded from the photoreceptors, and described the basic optics of the locust and fly eyes and their capture of single photons at extremely low light levels. He subsequently published about 250 papers on the compound and optic lobes of many kinds of insects. In 1969 he was elected to the Royal Society and in that year became one of four Founder Professors of Biological Sciences in the Australian National University where the work on insect vision continued. In 1990, discoveries of how insects pilot themselves in flight, together with his early experience working at Farnborough, led to applications in drone helicopters and planes, with computer and vision on board, supported by American funds. For more detail, see his web page at Adrian-Horridge.orgAdrian retired in 1992 and turned to the analysis of what bees see, by using a Y-choice maze. This analysis led to the discovery of feature detectors for combinations of edges, circles and spokes in one channel for green contrast at edges, and for content and height of blue in a separate channel. Left/right polarity between an area of blue and of green contrast was also detected, learned, and used as a signpost. The UV receptor in each ommatidia seems to be used only for registering the direction of the sky as an escape route. Hundreds of hours training bees and testing them for what they had learned led to a book "The Discovery of a Visual System: The Honeybee" (2019). Adrian is also known for his books and papers which record the lost maritime ethnology of Indonesia. In the 1970's and 80's he made a unique photographic record of many local types on many distant islands. That World Heritage fleet of thousands of fishing boats and outrigger canoes has now become motorised, designs changed, and rigging gone. There is little improvement in the catch because there was always overfishing and depletion, and now there is carbon dioxide emission from the engines.