spacer gif spacer gif spacer gif spacer gif spacer gif
QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced]


spacer gif
     Home     Help     Feedback     Subscriptions     Archive     Search     Table of Contents    

This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Smotherman, M. S.
Right arrow Articles by Narins, P. M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Smotherman, M. S.
Right arrow Articles by Narins, P. M.

Journal of Experimental Biology, Vol 203, Issue 15 2237-2246, Copyright © 2000 by Company of Biologists

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Hair cells, hearing and hopping: a field guide to hair cell physiology in the frog

MS Smotherman and PM Narins
Department of Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0427, USA.

For more than four decades, hearing in frogs has been an important source of information for those interested in auditory neuroscience, neuroethology and the evolution of hearing. Individual features of the frog auditory system can be found represented in one or many of the other vertebrate classes, but collectively the frog inner ear represents a cornucopia of evolutionary experiments in acoustic signal processing. The mechano-sensitive hair cell, as the focal point of transduction, figures critically in the encoding of acoustic information in the afferent auditory nerve. In this review, we provide a short description of how auditory signals are encoded by the specialized anatomy and physiology of the frog inner ear and examine the role of hair cell physiology and its influence on the encoding of sound in the frog auditory nerve. We hope to demonstrate that acoustic signal processing in frogs may offer insights into the evolution and biology of hearing not only in amphibians but also in reptiles, birds and mammals, including man.




© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2000