Fine Structure of the Vomeronasal Neuroepithelium of Bats: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The vomeronasal neuroepithelium of the vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, and the frugivorous bats, Carollia perspicillata and Artibeus jamaicensis, was examined at the light-microscopic and ultrastructural levels. The neuroepithelium of these species is basically similar in morphology to that of other mammals. However, hitherto unknown differences were noted in regard to the configuration of the apical poles of cells, in the occurrence of solitary cilia, dislocated sensory cells, brush cells, cell contacts and the occurrence and fine structure of basal cells. The morphology of the vomeronasal neuroepithelium of all three species is discussed from a comparative point of view in regard to chemoreception.

Fine Structure of the Vomeronasal Organ in the Chinchilla (<I>Chinchilla laniger</I>)

“…This finding agrees well with previous reports on the mouse [28], rat [28,301, golden hamster [27,30], rabbit [28], bat [5], dog [3,17], cat [23], sheep [15], cattle [2,26], and horse [261. In general, the sensory cells of the VNO( are bipolar neurons, send their axons as the vomeronasal nerve to the accessory olfactory; bulb, and extend their dendrites equipped with microvilli to the lumen of the VNO [10,11,31].…”

“…The other features of the supporting cell agreed well with those of the other species [2,3,5,[15][16][17]21,23,[25][26][27][28]30]. Therefore, the supporting cells of the chinchilla seem to play an ordinary role to support the function of the sensory cells as in the other species.…”

“…Phylogenetically, the VNO first appears in amphibians, is well developed in reptiles, but absent in birds [4,11,13,14]. In mammals, this organ varies in the development among species [12,14] , and is so far reported in rodents [7,20,27,28,301, rabbits [17,28], insectivores [211, carnivores [3,9,23] , bats [5], ungulates [2,9,15,26] and primates [16,19,24,251. Although rodents are used most frequently as experimental animals, fine structure of the VNO is hitherto examined only in the rat, mouse and golden hamster [7,20,27,28,30].…”

The bovine vomeronasal organ.

“…Ultrastructural characteristics of vomeronasal structures, as described by a number of authors (BREIPOHL et al, 1979;VACCAREZZA et al, 1981;BHATNAGAR et al, 1982;TANIGUCHI and MOcHIZUKI, 1982;ADAMS and WIEKAMP, 1984), are species variable.…”

Terminal nerve in the mouse‐eared bat (Myotis myotis): Ontogenetic aspects

“…In the material scrutinized in this study, neither accessory olfactory bulbs (AOB) nor vomeronasal nerves are present. Conflicting data in the literature regarding the existence of a VNO in bats (Humphrey, 1936;Schneider, 1957;Mann, 1961;Cooper and Bhatnagar, 1976;Kämper and Schmidt, 1977;Bhatnagar et al, 1982) will not be discussed here. For reviews on the VNO and AOB, most of which are focused on bats, see Mann (1961), Wysocki (1979), Frahm and Bhatnagar (1980), Baron et al (1996), Wible and Bhatnagar (1996), Bhatnagar and Meisami (1998), and Meisami and Bhatnagar (1998).…”