Limulus and the Story of Measuring the Voltage of a Single Nerve Fiber

The horseshoe crab is a useful experimental animal in at least this sense: they’re easy to collect up and down the Atlantic cost. Limulus’s lateral eye is jammed full of cell clusters called ommatidia that connect to the brain of the animal via a long optic nerve. Hartline was known for his careful preparation of delicate cellular material, and in the summer of 1933 he was working with Limulus in an attempt to isolate a single fiber from the optic nerve. Hartline focused his efforts on young crabs, because he knew that he could get clearer signals from their fully functioning eyes, however he wasn’t able to isolate a single nerve fiber. A student and friend of his, Harvard professor John Dowling, recounts Hartline’s explanation of the course of discovery. According to Dowling, Hartline was coming to the end of his summer research at the MBL, having failed to isolate a single nerve fiber. In the last few days of this summer’s research window, Hartline ran out of young Limulus specimens, and was left with the old, barnacle-encrusted specimens at the bottom of the tank. Hartline had a choice: go sailing, a life long hobby of his, or try the experiment on these less than ideal specimens. As the story goes, Hartline forwent sailing that day and so made the first of his important discoveries. The optic nerve of the adult animal was no easier to fray down to a single fiber than it was in the adolescents, yet Hartline succeeded in measuring clearly the voltage of a single optic nerve fiber (Graham and Hartline 1935; Hartline 1934). Hartline put the success in this case down to the fact the much of the optic nerve in mature specimen of Limulus was already dead: so it didn’t matter if he could anatomically isolate the fiber, since only one was active.

This little accident led to decades of work and novel discoveries. For example, Hartline showed that the intensity of light shining on photoreceptor cells didn’t change the amplitude of the voltage signal carried by the optic nerve; instead it changed the frequency of signaling. But it is our next story that details perhaps his most exciting contribution: lateral inhibition.

Suggested citation
LaTourelle, Jonathan Jacob. 2015. "The Neurobiology of Vision at the MBL". MBL History Project digital exhibit. http://history.archives.mbl.edu/exploring/exhibits/neurobiology-vision-mbl
Bibliography

Note: There is no science without a scientist, and so the author has attempted to maintain the essential truth of that—namely that at each stage of the scientific process there is a person looking at evidence and making judgments. However there is almost no personal biography, and much of the professional biography of each author has been abridged dramatically. In spite of this, the reader should keep in mind that each of these individuals were complicated people who share at least a job description. George Wald once said, “A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy”. Each of these individuals had a scientific ethic, as well as a body of scientific work, and where possible, the author of each section has attempted to not forget the romanticism of the spirit of investigation, or the fact that many of these people were excited by a simple truth—after all, they were seeing things no one else had seen before. That majesty can be easy to forget if you are an outsider new to the complexities of visual physiology, but these scientists never forgot it.

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Universalizing Photochemical Theories of Vision: Hecht, Wald, and the Marine Biological Laboratory

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Haldan Keffer Hartline, a Prize, and Two Accidents

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Roger Hanlon, Universal Camouflage, and Studying Vision at the MBL in the 21st Century

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