The Bidder Lecture, 1980: The Evolution of Fibrillar Muscle in Insects

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Fibrillar muscle is a peculiar type of striated muscle found only in the power producing flight muscles of certain higher Orders of insects and in the main timbal* muscle of the sound-production system of certain cicadas. It is recognizable both physiologically and histologically and is distinguishable from the tubular and ‘close-packed’ striated muscles found in nearly all other orders of insects in the flight system (Pringle, 1975). There are good reasons for thinking that tubular and close-packed muscles are the more primitive evolutionarily and that fibrillar muscle has arisen independently many times in the evolution of insects. Since it is inconceivable that, at any stage in these evolutionary developments, there was a loss of the capacity for flight or of sound-production, the problem arises of determining how the change could have come about. This is the subject of this lecture.