Skip to main content
Advertisement

Main menu

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Accepted manuscripts
    • Issue in progress
    • Latest complete issue
    • Issue archive
    • Archive by article type
    • Special issues
    • Subject collections
    • Interviews
    • Sign up for alerts
  • About us
    • About JEB
    • Editors and Board
    • Editor biographies
    • Travelling Fellowships
    • Grants and funding
    • Workshops and Meetings
    • The Company of Biologists
    • Journal news
  • For authors
    • Submit a manuscript
    • Aims and scope
    • Presubmission enquiries
    • Article types
    • Manuscript preparation
    • Cover suggestions
    • Editorial process
    • Promoting your paper
    • Open Access
    • Outstanding paper prize
    • Biology Open transfer
  • Journal info
    • Journal policies
    • Rights and permissions
    • Media policies
    • Reviewer guide
    • Sign up for alerts
  • Contacts
    • Contact JEB
    • Subscriptions
    • Advertising
    • Feedback
  • COB
    • About The Company of Biologists
    • Development
    • Journal of Cell Science
    • Journal of Experimental Biology
    • Disease Models & Mechanisms
    • Biology Open

User menu

  • Log in

Search

  • Advanced search
Journal of Experimental Biology
  • COB
    • About The Company of Biologists
    • Development
    • Journal of Cell Science
    • Journal of Experimental Biology
    • Disease Models & Mechanisms
    • Biology Open

supporting biologistsinspiring biology

Journal of Experimental Biology

  • Log in
Advanced search

RSS  Twitter  Facebook  YouTube  

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Accepted manuscripts
    • Issue in progress
    • Latest complete issue
    • Issue archive
    • Archive by article type
    • Special issues
    • Subject collections
    • Interviews
    • Sign up for alerts
  • About us
    • About JEB
    • Editors and Board
    • Editor biographies
    • Travelling Fellowships
    • Grants and funding
    • Workshops and Meetings
    • The Company of Biologists
    • Journal news
  • For authors
    • Submit a manuscript
    • Aims and scope
    • Presubmission enquiries
    • Article types
    • Manuscript preparation
    • Cover suggestions
    • Editorial process
    • Promoting your paper
    • Open Access
    • Outstanding paper prize
    • Biology Open transfer
  • Journal info
    • Journal policies
    • Rights and permissions
    • Media policies
    • Reviewer guide
    • Sign up for alerts
  • Contacts
    • Contact JEB
    • Subscriptions
    • Advertising
    • Feedback
Inside JEB
LATERAL LINE HELPS FISH DETERMINE SOUND DIRECTION
Kathryn Knight
Journal of Experimental Biology 2011 214: i doi: 10.1242/jeb.065698
Kathryn Knight
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Article
  • Info & metrics
  • PDF
Loading

It's almost impossible to creep up on some animals, such as goldfish, that streak for safety when alarmed. Donald Faber from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA, explains that the fish curl into a tight C shape and zip off in the opposite direction from a threatening sound. The big question was how do fish tell which direction the sound is approaching from to orchestrate the response. According to Faber, fish cannot use the time difference between a sound arriving at both ears to identify the direction, because they are transparent to sound waves and the sound arrives at both ears at the same time. However, he had a hunch that the fish's lateral line – a line of vibration sensors running along the fish's side – may help them to determine the origin of a threatening sound.

Mana Mirjany, Thomas Preuss and Faber designed their experiments to test this idea by taking advantage of the fish's natural behaviour (p. 3358). After inactivating the lateral line of a goldfish with cobalt chloride, Mirjany released the fish to swim naturally in a large circular tank equipped with two loudspeakers. Playing alarming sounds from each of the loudspeakers at random intervals, the team filmed the startled fish's reactions. Repeating the experiment using other techniques to inactivate the lateral line and also blindfolding the fish with custom-made eye caps, Mirjany then painstakingly analysed the fish's escape behaviour when it happened to be in open water and away from the tank sides.

Not surprisingly, the fish turned and fled, regardless of which sense they were deprived of: ‘The auditory system is sufficient to trigger an escape,’ says Mirjany.

Yet, the lateral line was essential for the fish to figure out which direction the threat was coming from, as the fish that had lost their lateral lines fled in random directions whereas the blindfolded fish (with an intact lateral line) successfully headed in the opposite direction from the threat. Yet, when Mirjany detached the body portion of the fish's lateral line from the nervous system, the fish were still able to escape in the opposite direction. So it was the anterior (head) section of the lateral line that was essential for the fish to locate the source of the scary sound and escape correctly.

However, Faber explains that the fish's startle response becomes more complex when the animals are close to an object that could block their escape. Instead, they override the startle response and turn towards the threat in order to avoid colliding with the obstacle. The team decided to find out how the lateral line affected the fish's escape response when near an obstruction.

Analysing the fish's reactions when they happened to be near the tank wall, the team realised that the lateral line and visual systems were both playing crucial roles in determining the direction that the escaping fish chose. The animals successfully overrode their standard escape response when their lateral line was inactivated and, when Mirjany repeated the experiment with blindfolded fish, they too successfully overrode the escape response. It was only when Mirjany blindfolded fish with inactivated lateral lines that the fish lost the ability to override the reflex. ‘There is either compensation between the visual and lateral line systems or there could be integration of the two, but it is difficult to say which at the moment,’ says Mirjany.

Having confirmed that goldfish use the lateral line to pin down the direction of a sound, Mirjany and Faber decided to determine how signals from the anterior portion of the lateral line contribute to the fish's escape response. Explaining that the tightly choreographed escape sequence is coordinated by a single neuron – the Mauthner cell (M-cell), which integrates all of the fish's sensory inputs and determines which direction the fish should flee – Faber and Mirjany decided to analyse the nerve input from the lateral line to the M-cell (p. 3368).

Stimulating the lateral line nerves electrically and recording the M-cell responses at various sites along the neuron, Mirjany found that the M-cell responded within 1 ms. ‘There is only about 3–4 ms from the time the stimulus occurs to the time that one of the Mauthner cells fires an action potential to trigger the response,’ explains Faber, so the M-cell response to the lateral line input was fast enough to control the fish's swift reaction. Also, the lateral line input was close to the M-cell cell body, allowing the coordinating cell to integrate the lateral line inputs with inputs from other sensory systems further out along the M-cell dendrites, to determine which escape strategy is best for each individual situation.

  • © 2011.

References

    1. Mirjany, M. and
    2. Faber, D. S.
    (2011). Characteristics of the anterior lateral line nerve input to the Mauthner cell. J. Exp. Biol. 214, 3368-3377.
    OpenUrlAbstract/FREE Full Text
    1. Mirjany, M.,
    2. Preuss, T. and
    3. Faber, D. S.
    (2011). Role of the lateral line mechanosensory system in directionality of goldfish auditory evoked escape response. J. Exp. Biol. 214, 3358-3367.
    OpenUrlAbstract/FREE Full Text
Previous ArticleNext Article
Back to top
Previous ArticleNext Article

This Issue

 Download PDF

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on Journal of Experimental Biology.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
LATERAL LINE HELPS FISH DETERMINE SOUND DIRECTION
(Your Name) has sent you a message from Journal of Experimental Biology
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the Journal of Experimental Biology web site.
Share
Inside JEB
LATERAL LINE HELPS FISH DETERMINE SOUND DIRECTION
Kathryn Knight
Journal of Experimental Biology 2011 214: i doi: 10.1242/jeb.065698
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Inside JEB
LATERAL LINE HELPS FISH DETERMINE SOUND DIRECTION
Kathryn Knight
Journal of Experimental Biology 2011 214: i doi: 10.1242/jeb.065698

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Alerts

Please log in to add an alert for this article.

Sign in to email alerts with your email address

Article navigation

  • Top
  • Article
    • References
  • Info & metrics
  • PDF

Related articles

Cited by...

More in this TOC section

  • Hunting great white sharks could motor but prefer to mosey
  • Skate eyes adapt subtly to see but not be seen
  • Spittlebugs snorkel in cuckoo spit
Show more INSIDE JEB

Similar articles

Other journals from The Company of Biologists

Development

Journal of Cell Science

Disease Models & Mechanisms

Biology Open

Advertisement

Featured article – Colour blindness test gets submerged

Cartoon fish having Ishihara's colour vision test

John Endler and team have come up with a new way to test animal colour vision based on methods to determine whether humans are ‘colour blind’, and they demonstrate how this method works with triggerfish.


Editorial - Thanking our peer reviewers in 2018

Thank you to our peer reviewers

We value the time and expertise of our reviewers and would like to publicly thank all those who have contributed to our peer review process in the past year.


Editors' choice - Global dynamics of bipedal macaques during grounded and aerial running

Macaque 'walking'

Trained macaques that can walk on two legs never seemed to run, but Naomichi Ogihara and team show that they run all the time, although their legs are too springy for them to get off the ground, and they can take off like runners when moving at top speed.


Conversation - Early-career researchers: an interview with Danielle Levesque

Danielle Levesque, Assistant Professor at the University of Maine

Danielle Levesque is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine, USA, where she studies hibernation and torpor in mammals. She told us how her research has taken her to Madagascar and Borneo, and why she thinks it is important to learn coding.

Read more of our interviews with early-career researchers on our Interviews page.


Journal news - Journal of Experimental Biology Outstanding Paper Prize 2018

Outstanding Paper Prize winners Till Harter, Mike Sackville and Dave Metzinger

Prize winners Till Harter, Mike Sackville and Dave Metzinger

We are delighted to announce the shortlist of papers nominated by the journal Editors for the 2018 award. Featuring topics as wide-ranging as the development of oxygen transport in snapping turtle embryos, the factors that cause cold flies to fall into a coma and the visual features that influence flying hoverflies, the shortlist celebrates the journal's diversity. Special congratulations go to Colin Brauner's team at the University of British Columbia, winner of this year's Outstanding Paper Prize.

Articles

  • Accepted manuscripts
  • Issue in progress
  • Latest complete issue
  • Issue archive
  • Archive by article type
  • Special issues
  • Subject collections
  • Interviews
  • Sign up for alerts

About us

  • About JEB
  • Editors and Board
  • Editor biographies
  • Travelling Fellowships
  • Grants and funding
  • Workshops and Meetings
  • The Company of Biologists
  • Journal news

For Authors

  • Submit a manuscript
  • Aims and scope
  • Presubmission enquiries
  • Article types
  • Manuscript preparation
  • Cover suggestions
  • Editorial process
  • Promoting your paper
  • Open Access
  • Outstanding paper prize
  • Biology Open transfer

Journal Info

  • Journal policies
  • Rights and permissions
  • Media policies
  • Reviewer guide
  • Sign up for alerts

Contact

  • Contact JEB
  • Subscriptions
  • Advertising
  • Feedback

 Twitter   YouTube   LinkedIn

© 2019   The Company of Biologists Ltd   Registered Charity 277992