During the rainy breeding season, the underwater “conversation” among electric fish changes. Fish revved up to make a match broadcast slightly different signals to advertise their presence and identify compatible mates. New research from Washington University in St. Louis shows that the hormone testosterone — which naturally triggers male electric fish to elongate the electric […]
Bruce Carlson, PhD, professor of biology, was recently awarded $980,000 by the National Science Foundation to study neuronal plasticity and the evolvability of behavior. Carlson and his team are examining how changes in an animal’s behavior alters the sensory feedback the animal receives, in turn leading to modifications to the animal’s brain. Mormyrid weakly electric fish, the […]
American writer and humorist Mark Twain, a master of language and noted lecturer, once offered, “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” Electric fish and today’s TED talk speakers take a page from Twain’s playbook. They pause before sharing something particularly meaningful. Pauses also […]
Electric fish generate electric pulses to communicate with other fish and sense their surroundings. Some species broadcast shorter electric pulses, while others send out long ones. But all that zip-zapping in the water can get confusing. The fish need to filter out their own pulses so they can identify external messages and only respond to […]
From the WashU Newsroom… Helmet-heads of the freshwater fish world, African mormyrid fishes are known for having a brain-to-body size ratio that is similar to humans. But there’s actually a great deal of variation in the size of mormyrid brains. These differences provide an opportunity to look at what’s behind the bulk. Researchers from Washington […]
Bruce Carlson, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, received $700,000 from the National Science Foundation for research on “Adaptive rewiring of a sensory network through spike-timing-dependent plasticity.” Read more.