Why the brown ghost chirps at night.

Since the pioneering work by Moeller, Szabo, and Bullock, weakly electric fish have served as a valuable model for investigating spatial and social cognitive abilities in a vertebrate taxon usually less accessible than mammals or other terrestrial vertebrates. These fish, through their electric organ, generate low-intensity electric fields to navigate and interact with conspecifics, even in complete darkness. The brown ghost knifefish is appealing as a study subject due to a rich electric 'vocabulary', made by individually variable and sex-specific electric signals.

Lightning Pose: improved animal pose estimation via semi-supervised learning, Bayesian ensembling and cloud-native open-source tools.

Contemporary pose estimation methods enable precise measurements of behavior via supervised deep learning with hand-labeled video frames. Although effective in many cases, the supervised approach requires extensive labeling and often produces outputs that are unreliable for downstream analyses. Here, we introduce 'Lightning Pose', an efficient pose estimation package with three algorithmic contributions.

Collective sensing in electric fish.

A number of organisms, including dolphins, bats and electric fish, possess sophisticated active sensory systems that use self-generated signals (for example, acoustic or electrical emissions) to probe the environment. Studies of active sensing in social groups have typically focused on strategies for minimizing interference from conspecific emissions. However, it is well known from engineering that multiple spatially distributed emitters and receivers can greatly enhance environmental sensing (for example, multistatic radar and sonar).

Collective Sensing in Electric Fish.

A number of organisms, including dolphins, bats, and electric fish, possess sophisticated active sensory systems that use self-generated signals (e.g. acoustic or electrical emissions) to probe the environment.

Ultra-high density electrodes improve detection, yield, and cell type identification in neuronal recordings.

To understand the neural basis of behavior, it is essential to sensitively and accurately measure neural activity at single neuron and single spike resolution. Extracellular electrophysiology delivers this, but it has biases in the neurons it detects and it imperfectly resolves their action potentials. To minimize these limitations, we developed a silicon probe with much smaller and denser recording sites than previous designs, called Neuropixels Ultra ().

Lightning Pose: improved animal pose estimation via semi-supervised learning, Bayesian ensembling, and cloud-native open-source tools.

Contemporary pose estimation methods enable precise measurements of behavior via supervised deep learning with hand-labeled video frames. Although effective in many cases, the supervised approach requires extensive labeling and often produces outputs that are unreliable for downstream analyses. Here, we introduce "Lightning Pose," an efficient pose estimation package with three algorithmic contributions.

The Use of Supervised Learning Models in Studying Agonistic Behavior and Communication in Weakly Electric Fish.

Despite considerable advances, studying electrocommunication of weakly electric fish, particularly in pulse-type species, is challenging as very short signal epochs at variable intervals from a few hertz up to more than 100 Hz need to be assigned to individuals. In this study, we show that supervised learning approaches offer a promising tool to automate or semiautomate the workflow, and thereby allowing the analysis of much longer episodes of behavior in a reasonable amount of time. We provide a detailed workflow mainly based on open resource software.

Neurobiology: The power of pauses in electrocommunication.

A new study of social communication behavior in weakly electric fish identifies neural mechanisms that may account for the significance of silent pauses in communication.

Task-Related Sensorimotor Adjustments Increase the Sensory Range in Electrolocation.

Perception and motor control traditionally are studied separately. However, motor activity can serve as a scaffold to shape the sensory flow. This tight link between motor actions and sensing is particularly evident in active sensory systems.

Motion parallax in electric sensing.

A crucial step in forming spatial representations of the environment involves the estimation of relative distance. Active sampling through specific movements is considered essential for optimizing the sensory flow that enables the extraction of distance cues. However, in electric sensing, direct evidence for the generation and exploitation of sensory flow is lacking.

Passive and active electroreception during agonistic encounters in the weakly electric fish Gymnotus omarorum.

Agonistic behaviour related to territorial defence is likely to be costly in terms of energy loss and risk of injury. Hence information about the fighting ability of a potential opponent could influence the outcome of the contest. We here study electric images of the territorial and aggressive weakly electric fish Gymnotus omarorum in the context of agonistic behaviour.

Computational modeling of electric imaging in weakly electric fish: insights for physiology, behavior and evolution.

Weakly electric fish can sense electric signals produced by other animals whether they are conspecifics, preys or predators. These signals, sensed by passive electroreception, sustain electrocommunication, mating and agonistic behavior. Weakly electric fish can also generate a weak electrical discharge with which they can actively sense the animate and inanimate objects in their surroundings.

Electric imaging through evolution, a modeling study of commonalities and differences.

Modeling the electric field and images in electric fish contributes to a better understanding of the pre-receptor conditioning of electric images. Although the boundary element method has been very successful for calculating images and fields, complex electric organ discharges pose a challenge for active electroreception modeling. We have previously developed a direct method for calculating electric images which takes into account the structure and physiology of the electric organ as well as the geometry and resistivity of fish tissues.