Anna Stöckl

University of Konstanz | Uni-Konstanz · Department of Biology

Colourful patterns on flowers are thought to benefit both pollinators and the plants they visit, by increasing the plants' pollination success via an increased foraging efficiency of the pollinators. This increased efficiency is assumed to result from a guidance effect of the flower patterns, correspondingly termed ‘nectar guides’, which indicate t...

A large proportion of animal species enjoy the benefits of being active at night, and have evolved the corresponding optical and neural adaptations to cope with the challenges of low light intensities. However, over the past century electric lighting has introduced direct and indirect light pollution into the full range of terrestrial habitats, cha...

Animals vary widely in body size within and across species. This has consequences for the function of organs and body parts in both large and small individuals. How these scale, in relation to body size, reveals evolutionary investment strategies, often resulting in trade-offs between functions. Eyes exemplify these trade-offs, as they are limited...

Many animals use visual cues to navigate their environment. To encode the large input ranges of natural signals optimally, their sensory systems have adapted to the stimulus statistics experienced in their natural habitats¹. A striking example, shared across animal phyla, is the retinal tuning to the relative abundance of blue light from the sky, a...

How neural form and function are connected is a central question of neuroscience. One prominent functional hypothesis, from the beginnings of neuroanatomical study, states that laterally extending dendrites of insect lamina monopolar cells (LMCs) spatially integrate visual information. We provide the first direct functional evidence for this hypoth...

One of the most dramatic changes occurring on our planet is the ever-increasing extensive use of artificial light at night, which drastically altered the environment to which nocturnal animals are adapted. Such light pollution has been identified as a driver in the dramatic insect decline of the past years. One nocturnal species group experiencing...

Many insects use the polarization pattern of the sky for spatial orientation. Since flying insects perform rapid maneuvers, including saccadic yaw turns which alternate with translational flight, they perceive highly dynamic polarization input to their navigation system. The tuning of compass-neurons in the central complex of insects, however, has...

Many insects use the polarization pattern of the sky for spatial orientation. Since flying insects perform rapid maneuvers, including saccadic yaw turns which alternate with translational flight, they perceive highly dynamic polarization input to their navigation system. The tuning of compass-neurons in the central complex of insects, however, has...

An animal’s behaviour is the result of multiple neural pathways acting in parallel, receiving information across and within sensory modalities at the same time. How these pathways are integrated, particularly when their individual outputs are in conflict, is key to understanding complex natural behaviours. We investigated this question in the visua...

Synopsis Reaching and inspecting objects is an intricate part of human life, which is shared by a diversity of animals across phyla. In addition to appendages like legs and antennae, some insects use their mouthparts to reach and inspect targets. Hawkmoths of the family Sphingidae (Lepidoptera) use their extremely long and straw-like proboscis to d...

Many insects use the polarization pattern of the sky for spatial orientation. Since flying insects perform rapid maneuvers, including saccadic yaw turns which alternate with translational flight, they perceive highly dynamic polarization input to their navigation system. The tuning of compass-neurons in the central complex of insects, however, has...

Visually guided reaching, a regular feature of human life, comprises an intricate neural control task. It includes identifying the target’s position in 3D space, passing the representation to the motor system that controls the respective appendages, and adjusting ongoing movements using visual and proprioceptive feedback. Given the complexity of th...

One of the most dramatic changes occurring on our planet in recent decades is the ever-increasing extensive use of artificial light at night, which drastically altered the environment nocturnal animals are adapted to. One nocturnal species group experiencing marked declines are moths, which are not only of great importance for species conservation,...

Colourful patterns on flowers are thought to benefit both pollinators and the plants they visit, by increasing the plants’ pollination success via an improved foraging efficiency of its pollinators. This increased efficiency is thought to result from a guidance effect of the flower patterns, correspondingly termed ‘nectar guides’, which indicate th...

A recent study has revealed how the connectivity of neurons in the lamina of the Asian swallowtail butterfly forms the basis of this insect’s exceptional colour vision through two circuit motifs: colour opponency of photoreceptors and broadband colour integration by lamina neurons.

Background Sixty percent of all species are insects, yet despite global efforts to monitor animal movement patterns, insects are continuously underrepresented. This striking difference between species richness and the number of species monitored is not due to a lack of interest but rather to the lack of technical solutions. Often the accuracy and s...

To safely navigate their environment, flying insects rely on visual cues, such as optic flow. Which cues insects can extract from their environment depends closely on the spatial and temporal response properties of their visual system. These in turn can vary between individuals that differ in body size. How optic flow-based flight control depends o...

Wing integrity is crucial to the many insect species that spend distinct portions of their life in flight. How insects cope with the consequences of wing damage is therefore a central question when studying how robust flight performance is possible with such fragile chitinous wings. It has been shown in a variety of insect species that the loss in...

The integrity of their wings is crucial to the many insect species that spend distinct portions of their life in flight. How insects cope with the consequences of wing damage is therefore a central question when studying how robust flight performance is possible with such fragile chitinous wings. It has been shown in a variety of insect species tha...

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are prominent for their annual long-distance migration from North America to their overwintering area in Central Mexico. To find their way on this long journey, they use a sun compass as their main orientation reference but will also adjust their migratory direction with respect to mountain ranges. This indica...

Monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus ) are prominent for their annual long-distance migration from North America to its overwintering area in Central Mexico. To find their way on this long journey, they use a sun compass as their main orientation reference but will also adjust their migratory direction with respect to mountain ranges. This indica...

Flying animals require sensory feedback on changes of their body position, as well as on their distance from nearby objects. The apparent image motion, or optic flow, which is generated as animals move through the air, can provide this information. Flight tunnel experiments have been crucial for our understanding of how insects use optic flow for f...

Hawkmoths (Lepidoptera, Sphingidae) comprise around 1500 species, most of which forage on nectar from flowers in their adult stage, usually while hovering in front of the flower. The majority of species have a nocturnal lifestyle and are important nocturnal pollinators, but some species have turned to a diurnal lifestyle. Hawkmoths use visual and o...

Flying animals need continual sensory feedback about their body position and orientation for flight control. The visual system provides essential but slow feedback. In contrast, mechanosensory channels can provide feedback at much shorter timescales. How the contributions from these two senses are integrated remains an open question in most insect...

Flying animals need constant sensory feedback about their body position and orientation for flight control. The visual system provides essential but slow feedback. In contrast, mechanosensory channels can provide feedback at much shorter timescales. How the contributions from these two senses are integrated remains an open question in most insect g...

The visual systems of many animals, particularly those active during the day, are optimized for high spatial acuity. However, at night, when photons are sparse and the visual signal competes with increased noise levels, fine spatial resolution cannot be sustained and is traded-off for the greater sensitivity required to see in dim light. High spati...

To sample information optimally, sensory systems must adapt to the ecological demands of each animal species. These adaptations can occur peripherally, in the anatomical structures of sensory organs and their receptors; and centrally, as higher-order neural processing in the brain. While a rich body of investigations has focused on peripheral adapt...

Flight control in insects is heavily dependent on vision. Thus, in dim light, the decreased reliability of visual signal detection also prompts consequences for insect flight. We have an emerging understanding of the neural mechanisms that different species employ to adapt the visual system to low light. However, much less explored are comparative...

Nervous tissue is one of the most metabolically expensive animal tissues, thus evolutionary investments that result in enlarged brain regions should also result in improved behavioural performance. Indeed, large-scale comparative studies in vertebrates and invertebrates have successfully linked differences in brain anatomy to differences in ecology...

Most of the world's animals are active in dim light and depend on good vision for the tasks of daily life. Many have evolved visual adaptations that permit a performance superior to that of manmade imaging devices [1]. In insects, a major model visual system, nocturnal species show impressive visual abilities ranging from flight control [2, 3], to...

In the study of insect neuroanatomy, three-dimensional reconstructions of neurons and neuropils have become a standard technique. As images have to be obtained from whole-mount brain preparations, pigmentation on the brain surface poses a serious challenge to imaging. In insects, this is a major problematic in the first visual neuropil of the optic...

In the study of insect neuroanatomy, three-dimensional reconstructions of neurons and neuropils have become a standard technique. As images have to be obtained from whole-mount brain preparations, pigmentation on the brain surface poses a serious challenge to imaging. In insects, this is a major problematic in the first visual neuropil of the optic...

Animals use vision over a wide range of light intensities, from dim starlight to bright sunshine. For animals active in very dim light the visual system is challenged by several sources of visual noise. Adaptations in the eyes, as well as in the neural circuitry, have evolved to suppress the noise and enhance the visual signal, thereby improving vi...

Extracting complementary features in parallel pathways is a widely used strategy for a robust representation of sensory signals. Weakly electric fish offer the rare opportunity to study complementary encoding of social signals in all of its electrosensory pathways. Electrosensory information is conveyed in three parallel pathways: two receptor type...

Even though humans see poorly at night, the majority of the world’s animals – both on land and under water – are active in dim light and many of them have excellent vision. Despite possessing tiny eyes and brains, nocturnal insects can distinguish colour, avoid obstacles during flight and find their way home using learned visual landmarks. But how...

We present a novel non-parametric method for finding a subspace of stimulus features that contains all information about the response of a system. Our method generalizes similar approaches to this problem such as spike triggered average, spike triggered covariance, or maximally informative dimensions. Instead of maximizing the mutual information be...

Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) produce rhythmic behaviour across all animal phyla. Cnidarians, which have a radially symmetric nervous system and pacemaker centres in multiples of four, provide an interesting comparison to bilaterian animals for studying the coordination between CPGs. The box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora is remarkable among c...