The cricket cercal system implements delay-line processing

The cercal sensory system of crickets mediates sensitivity to low-amplitude air currents. The sense organ for this system is a pair of antenna-like abdominal appendages called cerci, each of which is about 1 cm long in normal adult crickets. Although this system has been used extensively as a model system for studying the mechanisms underlying neural coding at the cellular and system levels, no previous studies have considered the functional significance of the physical dimensions of cerci. We show that the differential conduction characteristics of the receptor array in Acheta domesticus crickets are of substantial significance. All filiform sensory afferent axons we examined had the same propagation speeds to within a small variance, resulting in a significant and systematic differential propagation time for spikes from sensory receptors at different locations along the structure. Thus the sensory structures operate as delay lines. The delay-line structure supports neural computations in many of the projecting cercal interneurons (INs) that yield substantial differential sensitivity to the direction and velocity of naturalistic stimuli. Several INs show delay-line-derived sensitivities that are equivalent, in an engineering sense, to "notch filtering," through which background noise is selectively eliminated by the delay-line-based processing.