Back

Hatchling fish disperse using an efficient multisensory strategy

Lin, A.; Alvarez-Salvado, E.; Milicic, N.; Pujara, N.; Ehrlich, D. E.

2023-01-25 animal behavior and cognition
10.1101/2023.01.24.525385 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Animals improve fitness by choosing when and where to disperse in the environment using sensory cues. In freshwater habitats subject to flood and drought, dispersal can urgently challenge newly hatched fish. Here we manipulated rearing environment and sensory systems to reveal an adaptive sensorimotor strategy for dispersal. If we constrained hatchlings or blocked feedback about motion by simultaneously impairing the lateral line and vision, they gulped air and elevated their buoyancy to passively sail on faster surface waters. In stagnant water, hatchlings then covered more ground with hyperstable swimming, tightly steering based on graviception. In hydrodynamic simulations, these adaptations nearly tripled diffusivity and made dispersal robust to local conditions. Through combined use of three senses, hatchlings adapt their behavior to flexibly and efficiently disperse.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.