Lateral and medial telencephalic pallium lesions impair spatial memory in goldfish.

Fish, like many other animals, navigate to ensure survival. While the telencephalon region of the teleost fish brain is believed to play a critical role in navigation, lesion and electrophysiology studies differ as to whether navigation is situated in the lateral pallium or the medial pallium. To address this inconsistency, we replicated combined behavioral and lesion studies in the goldfish.

Radial astrocyte synchronization modulates the visual system during behavioral-state transitions.

Glial cells support the function of neurons. Recent evidence shows that astrocytes are also involved in brain computations. To explore whether and how their excitable nature affects brain computations and motor behaviors, we used two-photon Ca imaging of zebrafish larvae expressing GCaMP in both neurons and radial astrocytes (RAs).

Evolutionary modifications of larval prey capture (LPC) in a dark environment.

Feeding strategies of an organism depend on the multimodal sensory processing that most efficiently integrates available visual, chemosensory, and/or mechanoreceptive cues as part of their environmental adaptation. The blind cavefish morph of has developed sensory-dependent behaviors to find food more efficiently than their eyed, surface-morph counterparts while in darkness. In the absence of light, adult cavefish have evolved enhanced behaviors, such as vibration attraction behavior (VAB), and changes in feeding angle.

Boundary vector cells in the goldfish central telencephalon encode spatial information.

Navigation is one of the most fundamental cognitive skills for the survival of fish, the largest vertebrate class, and almost all other animal classes. Space encoding in single neurons is a critical component of the neural basis of navigation. To study this fundamental cognitive component in fish, we recorded the activity of neurons in the central area of the goldfish telencephalon while the fish were freely navigating in a quasi-2D water tank embedded in a 3D environment.

Optimal stopover model: A state-dependent habitat selection model for staging passerines.

During their seasonal migration, birds stage in areas comprising stopover sites of varying quality. Given that migrating birds have a limited information about their environment, they may land at a low-quality stopover site in which their fuel deposition rate (FDR) is low. Birds landing at such sites should decide either to extend their stopover duration or to quickly depart in search for a better site.

A Generalized Linear Model of a Navigation Network.

Navigation by mammals is believed to rely on a network of neurons in the hippocampal formation, which includes the hippocampus, the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), and additional nearby regions. Neurons in these regions represent spatial information by tuning to the position, orientation, and speed of the animal in the form of head direction cells, speed cells, grid cells, border cells, and unclassified spatially modulated cells. While the properties of single cells are well studied, little is known about the functional structure of the network in the MEC.

Wireless Electrophysiological Recording of Neurons by Movable Tetrodes in Freely Swimming Fish.

The neural mechanisms governing fish behavior remain mostly unknown, although fish constitute the majority of all vertebrates. The ability to record brain activity from freely moving fish would advance research on the neural basis of fish behavior considerably. Moreover, precise control of the recording location in the brain is critical to studying coordinated neural activity across regions in fish brain.

Wireless electrophysiology of the brain of freely swimming goldfish.

Background: Fish are a diverse group of vertebrates with very different brain structures. The study of the neurobiology of fish can thus lead to many important insights on information processing in the brain in a variety of environments.

New Method: We developed a novel wireless technique to record extracellular neural signal activity in freely behaving fish.