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Melatonin action in a midbrain vocal-acoustic network.

ABSTRACT: Melatonin is a well-documented time-keeping hormone that can entrain an individual's physiology and behavior to the day-night cycle, though surprisingly little is known about its influence on the neural basis of social behavior, including vocalization. Male midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) produce several call types distinguishable by duration and by daily and seasonal cycles in their production. We investigated melatonin's influence on the known nocturnal- and breeding season-dependent increase in excitability of the midshipman's vocal network (VN) that directly patterns natural calls. VN output is readily recorded from the vocal nerve as a 'fictive call'. Five days of constant light significantly increased stimulus threshold levels for calls electrically evoked from vocally active sites in the medial midbrain, supporting previous findings that light suppresses VN excitability, while 2-iodomelatonin (2-IMel; a melatonin analog) implantation decreased threshold. 2-IMel also increased fictive call duration evoked from medial sites as well as lateral midbrain sites that produced several-fold longer calls irrespective of photoregime or drug treatment. When stimulus intensity was incrementally increased, 2-IMel increased duration only at lateral sites, suggesting that melatonin action is stronger in the lateral midbrain. For animals receiving 5 days of constant darkness, known to increase VN excitability, systemic injections of either of two mammalian melatonin receptor antagonists increased threshold and decreased duration for calls evoked from medial sites. Our results demonstrate melatonin modulation of VN excitability and suggest that social context-dependent call types differing in duration may be determined by neuro-hormonal action within specific regions of a midbrain vocal-acoustic network.

SUBMITTER: Feng NY

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3966919 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Non-vocal, or unvoiced, signals surprisingly have received very little attention until recently especially when compared to other acoustic signals. Some sounds made by terrestrial vertebrates are produced not only by the larynx but also by the syrinx. Furthermore, some birds are known to produce several types of non-syrinx sounds. Besides mechanical sounds produced by feathers, bills and/or wings, sounds can be also produced by constriction, anywhere along the pathway from the lungs to the lips or nostrils (in mammals), or to the bill (in birds), resulting in turbulent, aerodynamic sounds. These noises often emulate whispering, snorting or hissing. Even though hissing sounds have been studied in mammals and reptiles, only a few studies have analyzed hissing sounds in birds. Presently, only the hissing of small, nesting passerines as a defense against their respective predators have been studied. We studied hissing in domestic goose. This bird represents a ground nesting non-passerine bird which frequently produces hissing out of the nest in comparison to passerines producing hissing during nesting in holes e.g., parids. Compared to vocally produced alarm calls, almost nothing is known about how non-vocal hissing sounds potentially encode information about a caller's identity. Therefore, we aimed to test whether non-vocal air expirations can encode an individual's identity similar to those sounds generated by the syrinx or the larynx. We analyzed 217 hissing sounds from 22 individual geese. We calculated the Potential for Individual Coding (PIC) comparing the coefficient of variation both within and among individuals. In addition, we conducted a series of 15 a stepwise discriminant function analysis (DFA) models. All 16 acoustic variables showed a higher coefficient of variation among individuals. Twelve DFA models revealed 51.2-54.4% classification result (cross-validated output) and all 15 models showed 60.8-68.2% classification output based on conventional DFA in comparison to a 4.5% success rate when classification by chance. This indicates the stability of the DFA results even when using different combinations of variables. Our findings showed that an individual's identity could be encoded with respect to the energy distribution at the beginning of a signal and the lowest frequencies. Body weight did not influence an individual's sound expression. Recognition of hissing mates in dangerous situations could increase the probability of their surviving via a more efficient anti-predator response.

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Melatonin action in a midbrain vocal-acoustic network.

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