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Published November 2007 | Supplemental Material + Cover Image + Published
Journal Article Open

Omnidirectional Sensory and Motor Volumes in Electric Fish

Abstract

Active sensing organisms, such as bats, dolphins, and weakly electric fish, generate a 3-D space for active sensation by emitting self-generated energy into the environment. For a weakly electric fish, we demonstrate that the electrosensory space for prey detection has an unusual, omnidirectional shape. We compare this sensory volume with the animal's motor volume—the volume swept out by the body over selected time intervals and over the time it takes to come to a stop from typical hunting velocities. We find that the motor volume has a similar omnidirectional shape, which can be attributed to the fish's backward-swimming capabilities and body dynamics. We assessed the electrosensory space for prey detection by analyzing simulated changes in spiking activity of primary electrosensory afferents during empirically measured and synthetic prey capture trials. The animal's motor volume was reconstructed from video recordings of body motion during prey capture behavior. Our results suggest that in weakly electric fish, there is a close connection between the shape of the sensory and motor volumes. We consider three general spatial relationships between 3-D sensory and motor volumes in active and passive-sensing animals, and we examine hypotheses about these relationships in the context of the volumes we quantify for weakly electric fish. We propose that the ratio of the sensory volume to the motor volume provides insight into behavioral control strategies across all animals.

Additional Information

© 2007 Snyder et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: March 29, 2007; Accepted: September 24, 2007; Published: November 13, 2007. We thank Kevin Lynch for generous assistance with the definition of the reachable set and motor volume. Author contributions. MAM, JWB, and JBS conceived and designed the experiments. JBS and MAM performed the experiments and analyzed the data. MAM, MEN, and JBS wrote the paper. This work was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant IOB-0517683 (MAM), the Chicago Biomedical Consortium with support from The Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust, NSF grant 0422073 (MEN), and the Engineering Research Centers Program of the NSF under grant EEC-9402726 (JWB). The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Supporting Information: Interactive 3D visualizations of the sensory volume for prey (water fleas, D. magna) (SV), time-limited motor volume (MV), and stopping motor volume (MVstop) for A. albifrons, the black ghost knifefish. These Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) models can be viewed using downloadable web browser plugins and external viewers available for many platforms. As of the date of publication, one of the following is recommended, in order of preference: Cortona VRML plugin (Windows and Mac OS X; available at: http://www.parallelgraphics.com/products/cortona). Octaga VRML player (Windows, Mac OS X. and Linux; available at: http://www.octaga.com/). Xj3D viewer (Windows, Mac OS X. and Linux; available at: http://www.web3d.org/x3d/xj3d/).

Attached Files

Published - SNYplosb07.pdf

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs1.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs2.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs3.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs4.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs5.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs6.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07figs7.vrml

Supplemental Material - SNYplosb07supptext.pdf

Cover Image - SNYplosb07.jpg

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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