El grillo è buon cantore: for Franz Huber on the occasion of his 90th birthday
Venue: Journal of Comparative Physiology A

acknowledge him as one of the founders of the then new field of neuroethology. His work did not go unnoticed. Taking over the Chair for Animal Physiology at the University of Cologne in 1963, the sensory side of the cricket communication system moved into the focus of attention. Franz Huber’s students Dieter Möss, Harald Nocke, and Eckehard Eibl pushed research on the cricket peripheral auditory pathway forward, revealing the organisation of the cricket ears, the neuroanatomical projections of their sensory fibres to the central nervous system and their physiological and mechanical response properties. First, extracellular recordings of action potentials from the ascending neurons in the connectives together with John Stout gave insight into the physiological representations of song patterns in the central nervous system, while Dietmar Otto refined the method of electrical brain stimulation  and together with Wolfram Kutsch provided deeper insight into the descending efferent control of calling, courtship and rivalry songs. These studies turned previous assumptions upside down: Remarkably, they demonstrated that crickets can even sing when the connectives to the brain are severed (Kutsch and Otto 1972). What did this mean? Was the original hypothesis all wrong? Was the central complex not the timer of the song pattern? David Bentley then provided the first intracellular recordings from motoneurons in fictively singing crickets. At the same time, Norbert Elsner explored the acoustic behaviour of grasshoppers, refining the method of electromyogram recordings to perfection and demonstrating the richness of grasshopper motor control of courtship behaviour. These were important achievements and contributions to the field. I had the chance to attend Franz Huber’s very last neurobiology seminar in Cologne, and for the first time encountered his sheer enthusiasm for the field, which was a Let me start this little homage with a song by Josquin Desprez to congratulate Franz Huber on the occasion of his 90th birthday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62aBOZrqh8). This medieval madrigal praises the enduringly singing cricket, “el grillo è buon cantore”. Its theme accompanied Franz Huber’s entire career as a scientist and mentor, a theme that still challenges ethologists, neurobiologists and geneticists today in their quest to understand the very core of animal behaviour. The explorations of Franz Huber  as a PhD student in Tübingen included pioneering studies of the brain and the central nervous system of crickets aiming to link the function of neuropils to the insect’s salient singing behaviour (Huber 1955). Were it reflexes or was it the brain that controlled singing? Were the mushroom bodies integrating sensory inputs? Was the central body timing the song pattern? What about the function of the thoracic ganglia and sensory inputs from the wings and the abdomen? These were challenging questions, yet methods were still coarse in those days: Iron Age tools from today’s perspective, a metal pin and a blade. So who would dare to penetrate an insect’s delicate brain with a needle? Franz Huber would, as the problem was clear: How is behaviour rooted in the function of the nervous system? Where in the nervous system are the centres programming and controlling cricket singing? Could he destroy or activate them? Not long after, the singing crickets provided the first answers. Once specific central brain regions were lesioned males sung to exhaustion. Franz Huber’s pioneering questions and experiments (Huber 1960) provided good reasons to