The neurons underlying swim behavior in Tritonia is one of the best understood neural networks that control a behavior. See recent papers by Paul Katz for the lastest results.
All of this work on Tritonia was started by Dennis Willows in the 60s at Friday Harbor Labs. He discovered the remarkable properties of its brain and its swimming behavior, and a novel neuropeptide controlling locomotion. Another neural network of interest is the one which controls ingestion behavior (work by Jim Beck and Dennis Willows), and the one that controls magnetic orientation, investigated by Ken Lohmann and Ion Popescu. Russell Wyeth is a doctoral student in Willows' lab studying orientation and brain-implanted microchips.
The laboratory of Rhanor Gillette sometimes works on Tritonia.
My Ph.D.
dissertation
contains a number of figures that you might find useful. It is a PDF
file. My
research
on Tritonia is done at UCA.
My
publications can be found on PubMed.
Tritonia diomedea
presumably got its specific name from the group of islands
in the Bering sea, unless the islands got their name from the slug.
Here is another page of Tritonia diomedea links, some of which are dead; a few are updated below.
http://slugsite.us/bow/nudiwk76.html
http://slugsite.us/bow/nudwk372.htm
http://slugsite.us/bow/bow46805.htm
http://siolibrary.ucsd.edu/slugsite/pacific/diomede.html
http://bio.classes.ucsc.edu/bio161l/NUDI/tdiomede.html
http://protist.biology.washington.edu/neurobiology/gallery.html
To search for bibilographic references to nudibranch research try: BIBLIOGRAPHIA
NUDIBRANCHIA or Biosis,
or try Medline
for biomedical uses of opisthobranchs. Also look for published
work at Google
Scholar.
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modified 3-13-06
