ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
The neurobiology of Etruscan shrew active touch.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Describing the musculature of mystacial pads in harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) using diceCT.Journal of anatomy · 2025Article
- Graded calls of the smallest terrestrial mammal, the Etruscan shrew, living in a closed habitat.iScience · 2024Article
- Anatomy of superior olivary complex and lateral lemniscus in Etruscan shrew.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Counterintuitive prey strategies against predators with finite budgets: protection heterogeneity among sites matters more than their number.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Monosynaptic trans-collicular pathways link mouse whisker circuits to integrate somatosensory and motor cortical signals.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Cortical synapses of the world's smallest mammal: An FIB/SEM study in the Etruscan shrew.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2023Article
- Idiosyncratic selection of active touch for shape perception.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Establishing and Maintaining an Etruscan Shrew Colony.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2022Article
- First Data on the Helminth Community of the Smallest Living Mammal on Earth, the Etruscan Pygmy Shrew,Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Seasonal plasticity in the adult somatosensory cortex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- The evolution of whisker-mediated somatosensation in mammals: Sensory processing in barrelless S1 cortex of a marsupial, Monodelphis domestica.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2016Article
- A miniscule model for research.Lab animal · 2016Article
- Brain mass and cranial nerve size in shrews and moles.Scientific reports · 2014Article
- The neurobiology and behavior of the American water shrew (Sorex palustris).Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2013Review
- Whisker movements reveal spatial attention: a unified computational model of active sensing control in the rat.PLoS computational biology · 2013Article
- Active tactile sampling by an insect in a step-climbing paradigm.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2012Article
- Active touch sensing.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- Biomimetic vibrissal sensing for robots.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Review
- Active touch in orthopteroid insects: behaviours, multisensory substrates and evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Review
- Active tactile exploration for adaptive locomotion in the stick insect.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Etruscan shrew, Suncus etruscus, is not only the smallest terrestrial mammal, but also one of the fastest and most tactile hunters described to date. The shrew's skeletal muscle consists entirely of fast-twitch types and lacks slow fibres. Etruscan shrews detect, overwhelm, and kill insect prey in large numbers in darkness. The cricket prey is exquisitely mechanosensitive and fast-moving, and is as big as the shrew itself. Experiments with prey replica show that shape cues are both necessary and sufficient for evoking attacks. Shrew attacks are whisker guided by motion- and size-invariant Gestalt-like prey representations. Shrews often attack their prey prior to any signs of evasive manoeuvres. Shrews whisk at frequencies of approximately 14 Hz and can react with latencies as short as 25-30 ms to prey movement. The speed of attacks suggests that shrews identify and classify prey with a single touch. Large parts of the shrew's brain respond to vibrissal touch, which is represented in at least four cortical areas comprising collectively about a third of the cortical volume. Etruscan shrews can enter a torpid state and reduce their body temperature; we observed that cortical response latencies become two to three times longer when body temperature drops from 36°C to 24°C, suggesting that endothermy contributes to the animal's high-speed sensorimotor performance. We argue that small size, high-speed behaviour and extreme dependence on touch are not coincidental, but reflect an evolutionary strategy, in which the metabolic costs of small body size are outweighed by the advantages of being a short-range high-speed touch and kill predator.
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