... are not well understood in many animals. Here, we examined these influences in the praying mantis Tenodera sinensis by presenting perching individuals with alternating sinusoidally moving prey-like stimuli and rapidly expanding looming stimuli then scoring their behavior on a defensive–aggressive scale...

... be considered as conservative, as we suspect that the actual behavioural threshold may be closer to PD=0.002–0.004, but confirmation of this will require further investigation. Octopuses responded to looming stimuli varying in polarization contrast alone and were sensitive to very small ΔAoP, particularly...

... and interocular velocity differences, and monocular cues such as looming. Although these have been studied in detail in humans, only looming responses have been well characterized in insects and we know nothing about the role of stereoscopic cues and how they might interact with looming cues. We used our 3D...

... of Buenos Aires , Argentina . Oliva , D. and Tomsic , D. ( 2012 ). Visuo-motor transformations involved in the escape response to looming stimuli in the crab Neohelice (=Chasmagnathus) granulata . J. Exp. Biol.   215 , 3488 - 3500 . 10.1242/jeb.070755 Oliva , D. and Tomsic...

... of motion-sensitive giant neurons projecting from the lobula (third optic neuropil) towards the supraesophageal ganglion. One of these elements, the monostratified lobula giant neuron of type 2 (MLG2), proved to be highly sensitive to looming stimuli (a 2D representation of an object approach...

... fixation on the prey, supporting a sensory basis for the surprising frequency and effectiveness of this tactic found by previous studies. The dynamics of the prey's looming image also suggested that the goshawk used a tau-based interception strategy. We interpret these results in the context of a concise...

.... , Christides   J. P. , Casas   J. ( 2007 ). Escape performance decreases during ontogeny in wild crickets . J. Exp. Biol.   210 , 3165 - 3170 . de Vries   S. E. J. , Clandinin   T. R. ( 2012 ). Loom-sensitive neurons link computation to action in the Drosophila visual system . Curr...

... maneuver or a landing response. To determine how a fly makes the decision to land on or avoid a looming object, we measured the behaviors generated in response to an expanding image during tethered flight in a visual closed-loop flight arena. During these experiments, each fly varied its wing-stroke...