Habitat complexity, brain, and behavior.

More complex brains and behaviors have arisen repeatedly throughout both vertebrate and invertebrate evolution. The challenge is to tease apart the forces underlying such change. In this review, I show how habitat complexity influences both brain and behavior in African cichlid fishes, drawing on examples from primates and birds where appropriate.

Environmental complexity and social organization sculpt the brain in Lake Tanganyikan cichlid fish.

Complex brains and behaviors have occurred repeatedly within vertebrate classes throughout evolution. What adaptive pressures drive such changes? Both environmental and social features have been implicated in the expansion of select brain structures, particularly the telencephalon. East African cichlid fishes provide a superb opportunity to analyze the social and ecological correlates of neural phenotypes and their evolution.

Visual acuity, environmental complexity, and social organization in African cichlid fishes.

The authors studied the effects of habitat complexity and social organization on visual acuity in closely related cichlid fishes (the Ectodini clade). The authors quantified habitat complexity among sand, intermediate, and rock habitats using chromatic difference measures (intensity analysis). Visual acuity was measured behaviorally, using optomotor/optokinetic responses to rotating square-wave stimuli.

Mechanisms underlying reorganization of fractured tactile cerebellar maps after deafferentation in developing and adult rats.

Our previous studies showed that fractured tactile cerebellar maps in rats reorganize after deafferentation during development and in adulthood while maintaining a fractured somatotopy. Several months after deafferentation of the infraorbital branch of the trigeminal nerve, the missing upper lip innervation is replaced in the tactile maps in the granule cell layer of crus IIa. The predominant input into the denervated area is always the upper incisor representation.