The generation of respiratory rhythms in birds

The generation of precise respiratory rhythms is vital for birds, which must generate specific pressure patterns to perform several activities, song being one of the most demanding ones. These rhythms emerge as the interaction between a peripheral system and a set of neural nuclei which control the action of expiratory and inspiratory muscles. A computational model was proposed recently to account for this interaction. In this work, we describe the set of solutions that this model can display as its parameters are varied, and compare experimental records of air sac pressure patterns with the predictions of the model. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.