The organization and length of a muscle's fascicles imparts its contractile properties. Longer fascicles permit increased muscle excursion, whereas changes in fascicle orientation relate to the overall vector of contractile force. Collecting data on fascicle architecture has traditionally involved destructive and irreversible gross dissection. In recent years, however, new imaging modalities have permitted muscles and their fascicles to be visualized nondestructively. Here, we present data from a primate (
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Analysis of muscle architecture, traditionally conducted via gross dissection, has been used to evaluate adaptive relationships between anatomical form and behavioral function. However, gross dissection cannot preserve three‐dimensional relationships between myological structures for analysis. To analyze such data, we employ diffusible, iodine‐based contrast‐enhanced computed tomography (DiceCT) to explore the relationships between feeding ecology and masticatory muscle microanatomy in eight dietarily diverse strepsirrhines: allowing, for the first time, preservation of three‐dimensional fascicle orientation and tortuosity across a functional comparative sample. We find that fascicle properties derived from these digital analyses generally agree with those measured from gross‐dissected conspecifics. Physiological cross‐sectional area was greatest in species with mechanically challenging diets. Frugivorous taxa and the wood‐gouging species all exhibit long jaw adductor fascicles, while more folivorous species show the shortest relative jaw adductor fascicle lengths. Fascicle orientation in the parasagittal plane also seems to have a clear dietary association: most folivorous taxa have masseter and temporalis muscle vectors that intersect acutely while these vectors intersect obliquely in more frugivorous species. Finally, we observed notably greater magnitudes of fascicle tortuosity, as well as greater interspecific variation in tortuosity, within the jaw adductor musculature than in the jaw abductors. While the use of a single specimen per species precludes analysis of intraspecific variation, our data highlight the diversity of microanatomical variation that exists within the strepsirrhine feeding system and suggest that muscle architectural configurations are evolutionarily labile in response to dietary ecology—an observation to be explored across larger samples in the future.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 2314898
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10529561
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Anatomical Record
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Anatomical Record
- Volume:
- 307
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1932-8486
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1975 to 1994
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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