Touch a cricket in the right way and the insect will hurl itself out of range, but only if the threat feels right. Crickets have a range of mechanosensors that distinguish between a variety of contact stimuli, but only a subset of the sensory cells trigger the insects to leap to safety. Tetsutaro Hiraguchi and colleagues have been looking at the sensory cells arranged on the wing tips of crickets and have discovered a new type of sensory cell that triggers the insects to escape by jumping.
Working with Tsuneo Yamaguchi and Masakazu Takahata, Hiraguchi looked at the structure of sensory cells arranged on the surface of the wing tip. The team found two well known types of receptor cell, but they also discovered a third cell with an unusual twisted shape. They tested the new cell's sensitivity and the speed of the signal that it sends, and they suggest that this new type of receptor is a non-specific touch sensor that simply tells the insect when it has been bumped and needs to make a quick get away.
