Berkeley - Aquatic creatures like lobsters and crabs depend on smell to find food, a suitable mate or to avoid predators, but how do they pluck these odors from the water swirling around them?
A study in the Friday, Nov. 30, issue of Science by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University details the sophisticated way in which spiny lobsters sniff their way around a watery world, and may provide strategies for robot builders looking for efficient ways to create odor sensors.
"If you want to build unmanned vehicles or robots to go into toxic sites where you do not want to send a scuba diver, and if you want those robots to locate something by smell, you need to design noses or olfactory antennae for them," said lead author Mimi A. R. Koehl, professor of integrative biology in the College of Letters & Science at UC Berkeley. "We are learning how animal antennae capture odor molecules from the water around them. We want to understand which designs of odor-catching antennae work successfully in nature so that they could provide inspiration for man-made antennae."
Lobsters and other crustaceans sniff by flicking a pair of antennules, dragging them through the water to bring chemosensory hairs on the ends of the antennules into contact with odor molecules. On some lobsters, the antennules can be rather short, though in the foot-long Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus, they are between 3 and 4 inches long, with split ends. On the outer edge of one of the split ends of each antennule is a brush of hairs sensitive to chemicals.
The question the researchers asked is whether the incessant flicking of antennules can pick up fine details of the swirling odors, and how odor molecules penetrate into the brush of chemosensory hairs.
The UC Berkeley researchers first made high-speed videos of a lobster flicking its antennules in order to determine how fast, how far and how often they flick, and the ang
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Contact: Robert Sanders
rls@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
30-Nov-2001