How electric fish got their big brains Date: November 15, 2018 Source: Washington University in St. Louis Summary: Researchers have mapped the regions of the brain in mormyrid fish in extremely ...

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 ...

Prof. Carl Hopkins researches Mormyrid fish, which are known as weakly electric fish because they produce small electric currents and use electric fields for communication and location purposes.

African fish called mormyrids communicate by means of electric signals (white lines following fish). Research has shown that fish in one group (top five) can glean detailed information from a ...

The experiments showed that mormyrid fish in Clade A were able to distinguish among pulses, but other mormyrids (those with the EL brain) were not.

Among mormyrid fish, conversation is literally buzzing. Using specialized electricity-emitting organs in their tails, these African natives string together short shocks into a primitive analog to ...

But not every electric fish species has the same grasp of the language, Carlson says. From behavioral studies, the team demonstrated that some mormyrid species can sense and respond to small ...

A mormyrid’s electric signature is so distinct that Sullivan can use it to identify the species---that's why he goes out of his way to catch them alive in a trap as opposed to on a line, which ...

Fish living in the murky rivers of West Africa have evolved their own hearing-aids. A tiny gas-filled bubble inside the ear of the mormyrid electric fish vibrates as mating calls or alarm signals ...

Prof. HOPKINS: This fish that we work on are called Mormyrid fish. They generate weak electric signals using an organ, an electric organ located in the tail, which produces about a 10-volt ...

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 ...

Figure 1: Parallel fibers and their targets in the DCN. The mammalian DCN resembles the electrosensory lobe of mormyrid fish, in which STDP has been documented 14,15. Both are cerebellum-like ...