ABSTRACT
The texture of contacted surfaces influences our perception of the physical environment and modulates behavior. Texture perception and its neural encoding mechanisms have traditionally been studied in the primate hand, yet animals of all types live in richly textured environments and regularly interact with textured surfaces. Here we explore texture sensation in a different type of vertebrate limb by investigating touch and potential texture encoding mechanisms in the pectoral fins of fishes, the forelimb homologs. We investigated the pectoral fins of the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus), a bottom-dwelling species that lives on substrate types of varying roughness and whose fins frequently contact the bottom. Analysis shows that the receptive field sizes of fin ray afferents are small and afferents exhibit response properties to tactile motion that are consistent with those of primates and other animals studied previously. In response to a periodic stimulus (coarse gratings), afferents phase lock to the stimulus temporal frequency and thus can provide information about surface texture. These data demonstrate that fish can have the capability to sense the tactile features of their near range physical environment with fins.
Footnotes
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: A.R.H., M.E.H.; Methodology: A.R.H., M.E.H.; Software: A.R.H.; Validation: A.R.H.; Formal analysis: A.R.H., M.E.H.; Investigation: A.R.H.; Resources: A.R.H., M.E.H.; Data curation: A.R.H.; Writing - original draft: A.R.H.; Writing - review & editing: A.R.H., M.E.H.; Visualization: A.R.H., M.E.H.; Supervision: M.E.H.; Project administration: M.E.H.; Funding acquisition: A.R.H., M.E.H.
Funding
This work is supported by the Office of Naval Research grant N00014-18-1-2673 on fin neuromechanics monitored by Dr Thomas McKenna. A.R.H. was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under IGERT grant DGE-0903637 and GRFP grant DGE-1144082.
Data availability
Data are available from Dryad (Hardy and Hale, 2020): h9w0vt4gb
Supplementary information
Supplementary information available online at https://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.227280.supplemental
- Received April 25, 2020.
- Accepted September 9, 2020.
- © 2020. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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