Feeling the heat.

A locust can make a tasty morsel for a hungry predator, so being able to notice potentially dangerous looming objects and trigger the correct response could save a locust’s life. In locusts, a visual neuron called the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD) spikes in response to looming objects and could therefore be the trigger for escape responses. Tomas Money and colleagues at Queen’s University in Canada knew that nervous systems in cold-blooded animals like locusts can be severely affected by temperature and can even fail at high temperatures. But the effects of very high temperature can be lessened if a creature has experienced a prior heat shock at a high, but sub-lethal, temperature. Money and his colleagues wondered if heat shock protects the DCMD neuron from soaring temperatures. If it does, then the behaviours that are guided by this neuron should be unaffected in heat-shocked locusts, even when the going gets hot.