The role of the submentalis muscle in the feeding biomechanics of the marine toad, Rhinella marina
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Developmental Biology, Neuroscience
- Keywords
- kinematics, feeding, amphibian, functional morphology
- Copyright
- © 2017 Puljan et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. The role of the submentalis muscle in the feeding biomechanics of the marine toad, Rhinella marina. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3131v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3131v1
Abstract
It is well documented that coordination of feeding behavior in anuran amphibians requires precise coordination of the jaw levators and depressors with the timing of the protraction of the tongue. (for review, see Nishikawa, 2000). However, the neuronal mechanism initiating and synchronizing this coordination is not well understood. In addition to the intermandibularis muscle and tongue musculature in the lower jaw, there is a small, transverse muscle at the tip of the jaw, the m. submentalis. Previous anatomical work has demonstrated the presence of muscle spindles in the submentalis, leading to the hypothesis that the activation of this muscle may provide proprioceptive information to aid in coordinating the feeding biomechanics in Rhinella marina. Here, we demonstrate that the submentalis likely acts as a ‘trigger’ to initiate the hypoglossal nerve to activate the tongue, and without feedback information from the muscle spindles of the submentalis, tongue protraction is compromised.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Summary statistics
Summary statistics of 102 feeding sequences analyzed from 3,264 individual frames during the kinematic analysis