Flight power muscles have a coordinated, causal role in controlling hawkmoth pitch turns

Flying insects solve a daunting control problem of generating a patterned and precise motor program to stay airborne and generate agile maneuvers. In this motor program, consisting of every action potential controlling wing musculature, each muscle encodes significant information about movement in precise spike timing down to the millisecond scale. While individual muscles share information about movement, we do not yet know if they have separable effects on an animal's motion, or if muscles functionally interact such that the effects of any muscle's timing depend heavily on the state of the entire musculature. To answer these questions, we performed spike-resolution electromyography and precise stimulation of individual spikes in the hawkmoth Manduca sexta during tethered flapping. We specifically explored how the flight power muscles themselves may contribute to pitch control, which is necessary to stabilize flight. Combining a correlational study of visually-induced turns with causal..., Moths attached to a 6-axis load cell tether would freely engage in bouts of flapping flight, during which the DLMs would be stimulated with a specific timing relative to the DVMs. Stimulus delay times were chosen at random from a range of 4-40 ms after DVM spike detection, with each delay time applied for a 20 second recording period with EMG and F/T transducer recorded at 10 kHz. Single 0.25 ms pulses of either constant current or constant voltage were applied to silver wires placed on either end of each DLM, with each stimulation separated by at least 4 seconds to avoid entrainment. Timing of stimulus was achieved by passing either the left or right DVM voltage recording through a custom analog spike-detection circuit and microcontroller. The controller would trigger a stimulator (A-M Systems Model 3800) with a stimulus isolation unit (A-M Systems Model 2200) on a controlled delay time from the onset of a detected DVM spike. 
All stimulus pulses were biphasic, but specific stimul..., , # Flight power muscles have a coordinated, causal role in controlling hawkmoth pitch turns

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.76hdr7t4f](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.76hdr7t4f)

This repository contains data of Manduca sexta hawkmoths flapping on a dorsal tether, with electrical stimulation applied periodically to the dorsolongitudinal muscles (DLMs) to elicit muscle action potentials at specific times. Contained here are .h5 files for each individual moth in the dataset, named according to the date the data was collected (with an appending \_1 if multiple moths were run on that same data).

The .h5 files can be read by any standard hdf5 library, but we did all of our processing using Python and the Pandas library specifically. Reading each .h5 file, you will find a dataframe of all relevant time-series information from a given moth, sampled at 10kHz. This includes spike times of when the DLM and DVM muscles fired, the six time-varying forces and torques produced by the moth flapping on t...,