Sensory and Motor Systems
Author: Federico Yulita | Email: federico_yulita@hotmail.com
Federico Yulita1°2°, Lidia Szczupak1°3°, Martina Radice1°3°
1° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias, UBA-CONICET, Argentina
2° Departamento de Física, UBA-CONICET, Argentina
3° Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Leeches crawl on solid surfaces through a succession of extension and contraction body waves moving in an antero-posterior order, anchored on its anterior and posterior suckers. This rhythmic, step-like behavior displaces the animal forward. We aim at characterizing this behavior including the coordination of its body segments to analyze the metachronal nature of this movement, using DeepLabCut.
Each crawling step can be divided into 5 phases: an Initial Rest followed by an Extension of its body up to a Plateau phase where its body length is maintained, and a Contraction phase that ends in a Final Resting phase. The period is a function of the duration of each of these phases, except for the plateau phase. The most predominant phases are the extension and the plateau phases, taking up almost two thirds of the entire step.
Results show that during each step there is a strong correlation in length and speed between adjacent body segments, indicating that crawling results from a wave-like pattern confirming the metachronal nature of the behavior.