Energetics of Sensing and Communication in Electric Fish: A Blessing and a Curse in the Anthropocene?

Weakly electric freshwater fish use self-generated electric fields to image their worlds and communicate in the darkness of night and turbid waters. This active sensory/communication modality evolved independently in the freshwaters of South America and Africa, where hundreds of electric fish species are broadly and abundantly distributed. The adaptive advantages of the sensory capacity to forage and communicate in visually-unfavorable environments and outside the detection of visually-guided predators likely contributed to the broad success of these clades across a variety of Afrotropical and neotropical habitats.