The cricket brain: a tractable system for decoding neural aging

Abstract

Aging of the nervous system begins before overt cognitive impairment, yet identifying early predictors of neural vulnerability remains challenging in conventional vertebrate models. Crickets offer a complementary system in which sensory function, cognition, adult neurogenesis, and molecular mechanisms can be followed across a short, experimentally accessible lifespan. Their mushroom bodies support associative learning and memory while retaining adult-born Kenyon cells, providing a rare opportunity to link neuronal renewal directly to cognitive aging. Age-dependent changes in olfaction, vision, learning, and decision-making may further provide early behavioral signatures of declining neural function. Emerging genetic approaches, including preliminary evidence for adeno-associated virus delivery to the adult cricket brain, could extend this model from observation to causal intervention. Rather than serving as a miniature human brain, the cricket offers a simplified system for identifying conserved mechanisms of neural resilience and testing whether early sensory and behavioral changes predict, and potentially modify, subsequent cognitive decline.

Keywords. aging; cricket; adult neurogenesis; cognitive decline; olfaction; neural resilience