When Roy Ritzmann and his research team at Case Western Reserve University published their research on controlling the motor skills of cockroaches, many subsequent stories in the mainstream media focused on the team’s ability to “drive” a cockroach.
“Actually, driving cockroaches was only a minor part of the research that the press always seemed to seize upon,” says Ritzmann, a biology professor at CWRU who co-wrote the research paper with lead author Joshua Martin, a postdoctoral researcher in Ritzmann’s lab. “The whole point of driving the cockroaches was to record from a region of the brain to study what role it has in sensory motor control.”
Focusing on the central complex, a group of mid-lying cells within the insect’s brain, the team inserted tiny wires into 27 free-walking cockroaches and recorded the neural activity. They found that they could not only predict animal motor skill behavior, such as walking, turning or climbing, they could replicate it with proper stimulation.
“Our feeling was that this area of the brain is doing something that neuroethologists think is fundamentally important,” says Ritzmann, “and that is making the animal’s behavior consistent with the immediate conditions the animal is experiencing.”
One of the main tenets of neuroethology is something called context-dependent behavior — the fact that animals don’t behave in the same way from moment to moment, but react to different stimuli that is dependent on what is going on around or within the animal.
“The statement we made in our paper is that, if you are going to build autonomous agents, you might want to add this capability,” Ritzmann explains.
The implications are unbelievably profound for any automaton, whether it’s a robot, drone or even a self-driving car. Mapping neural activity and placing something similar into an inanimate object could impart basic motor or instinctive skills to the device.
Think of a self-driving car not only knowing what road it’s on, but how to avoid a pothole, when to stop for gas, or why it should lower its speed below the recommended limit on a bumpy road to avoid hurting itself. Think about a car that not only tells you when it needs service, but stops for that service to avoid some sort of catastrophic failure of a device or component.
Think about interplanetary roving devices that wouldn’t have to wait an hour or more for commands from Earth, but rather would navigate by themselves in the proper direction, avoiding any obstacles that might cause them harm.
“It’s kind of like asking a dog to fetch,” explains Ritzmann. “You throw a stick and he goes after it. What you don’t realize is that he can change his gait because the grass might be wet, or he can change his direction to avoid a tree or a bush. These are very complex reactions, which the dog does automatically.”
Needless to say, the research at CWRU has garnered a lot of attention beyond steering a cockroach to the left or right. CWRU and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History recently received a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study predatory behavior of the praying mantis. The CWRU team will be working with Gavin Svenson, Ph.D., coordinator of research, Division of Collections & Research at the museum. Dr. Svenson, who also is curator and head of the museum’s invertebrate zoology, is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on praying mantises and their behavior.
“If a praying mantis is hungry, it will stalk and attack its prey,” says Ritzmann. “But if it has eaten and its belly is full, it will sit and turn into an ambush predator, only striking when an insect comes close.”
“We have found that injecting insulin into the abdomen of a praying mantis can change it from a stalking predator into an ambush predator.”
So, in addition to basic neural activity, this research will also focus on the impact various hormones have on insect behavior — another important key in understanding basic behavior in the world around us.