Surface wave detection by animals

(See the work of Bleckmann, Schwartz, Müller, etc., 1965-present).

The experimental setup for testing A lineatus' abilities is very standardized. Subject fish are often blinded so that visual cues cannot be used. Stimuli are delivered to the surface of the water in a test tank via one of two methods (experimenters often use both): for the first, a loudspeaker is set up facing the water surface, while a plastic disc covers the front of the speaker cone with a small hole in the center, allowing air to be pushed through the hole to stimulate the water surface in a pattern controlled by a square-wave generator. Alternatively, a small rod a few millimeters in diameter is dipped briefly a few centimeters into the water. Either setup can be moved around the tank to deliver stimuli at various locations. The loudspeaker setup offers the advantage that stimuli can be precisely controlled to mimic natural stimuli or to test certain wave properties.

Wave characteristics are measured optically. This is done by shining a laser (often helium-neon) at the water surface. Reflections and distortions of the laser's beam are picked up by a photodiode.

Fishes' movements are videotaped with a high-speed camera from above the testing tank so that the precise timing and nature of their responses' to stimuli can be reviewed.

Aplocheilus lineatus assumes a hunting posture at the water surface in which it holds the top of its head within 200 μm of the water surface.[1] On perception of appropriate wave stimuli, fish first turn towards the stimulus.[4] This initial turn is made within 150ms of the wavetrain's arrival to the fish.[1] Fish then swim to the wave's source. There are specific parameters for wave stimuli to be perceived which reflect the type of waves produced by prey. Fish are least sensitive to low frequencies, with a minimum threshold of 10 Hz and have peak sensitivity at 75–150 Hz; the highest frequency they can detect is 250 Hz.[5] These waves have small amplitudes (on a micrometer-scale), and fish can detect waves with minimum peak-to-peak displacement of 1 μm at 10 Hz and 0.0007μm in their most sensitive range of 75–100 Hz. Fish are also sensitive to waves generated within 7–30 cm of the fish's location, though they can occur at any point within that radius. Because the water surface acts as a low pass filter, this radius is different for different wave frequencies: 70 Hz waves with 100μm peak-to-peak distance are subthreshold at 37 cm, and 140 Hz waves are subthreshold at 19 cm.[6] Fish are able to tell apart concurrent waves of different frequencies when the frequencies are different by at least 15%, though at certain frequencies this difference can be as low as 8%.[7]

The wave-detection system of A lineatus and other surface feeding fish is tuned to match the waves that signal prey in their environment. A lineatus feeds on aquatic, semi-aquatic and terrestrial insects, often insects that have just touched the surface of the water or have fallen in and are struggling at the surface.[7][8] Abiotic sources give off capillary waves of frequency 8–14 Hz, while biotic sources give off much higher frequencies, anywhere from 12–45 Hz and above.[9] This correlates well with A lineatus' peak sensitivity at higher frequencies.

Wave stimuli are classified into two types: the first is click stimuli (short bursts of amplitude less than 100μm which contain many frequencies between 5 Hz and 190 Hz and are of short duration, as when an insect just touches the water rather than moves continuously at the surface).[6] The other is continuous wave stimuli, which will contain many frequencies and in the wild are generated by fallen prey struggling at the water surface.[7]

It has been pointed out that A lineatus and other surface feeding fish are able to locate prey even if the waveform is only in click form (just touching the surface once, as when surfacing for air or when a mosquito larva is hatching),[10] which takes less time to complete than the fish will take to swim over.[2][10] This indicates that the fish are simply performing a form of sensory taxis, that they are getting all the information they need to locate the prey in the initial stimulus reception and are retaining the location while orienting and swimming. Fish also can begin orienting and swimming after receiving only the first few waves in a wavetrain or click stimulus.

When stimuli are presented within a detectable range, orientations toward the stimulus by A lineatus are extremely precise: the response is almost perfect with angles up to 150° in either direction from forwards, and precision falls off but not much when waves come from the rear of the fish.[3]

There is some disagreement in the field about how A lineatus determines the direction of a stimulus. A common suggestion is that an animal performs a ray tracing calculation, similar to what human oceanographers use to locate ocean storms without a satellite.[2] Theoretically, an animal could compare the arrival times of a wavetrain at two neuromasts, effectively measuring the curvature of the wavefront (the farther away the fish is from the source, the less arc angle will be measured in the distance between the neuromasts).[2] However, there is no evidence of a neural circuit that performs this calculation, and other researchers suggest that the distance between any pair of surface wave neuromasts is too small (A lineatus's head is only 1 cm wide) for the calculation to be made accurately, and then at distances from the stimulus less than 7 cm.[11] The accuracy predicted by a time-difference mechanism (using triangulation of the wave source based on curvature of wave front) doesn't match actual accuracy.[7] Additionally it has been shown that if all neuromasts are removed except for one, direction detection still occurs to some degree,[12]

An alternative theory is that individual neuromasts have a preferred direction, that is they are most sensitive to waves coming from a particular direction. A comparison of activation levels of different neuromasts is a relatively easy neural calculation to perform.

When neuromasts are removed unilaterally, fish still turn towards the side the stimulus came from though overestimate the angle by an average of 21° towards the side with intact neuromasts.[3] In this situation, fish often make two turns, first towards the side with intact neuromasts and then back towards the other.[3]

Each neuromast has a preferred direction. This was shown in 1970 through ablation of all but one neuromast: fish then usually turned towards one range of directions regardless of where the stimulus came from.[13] The direction sensitivity, as revealed via electrophysiology, shows a cosine function describing receptor firing intensity: accuracy depends on receptor orientation and arrangement and intensity-difference threshold.[7]

In 2011 it was shown that there are certain fleshy ridges around each neuromast that direct water flow. When these ridges were removed, the receptive field for each neuromast was much wider than that with intact ridges; this was shown with electrophysiology.[1] The same experiment also showed that adding ridges to neuromasts that did not previously have ridges also altered the receptive fields for those neuromasts.[1] This suggests that local water flow is important in direction detection.

A lineatus and other surface wave detecting fish have a limited range in which they can detect surface waves. The ratio of source distance/swim distance ranges between 0.84 and 1.20, and the means range from 0.98 to 1.07.[7] This translates to an accuracy of 85% or higher when stimuli are 6–19 cm from the fish, decreasing to 76% at 14 cm.[3] As the wave source gets farther from a fish, the fish's ability to accurately determine distance decreases until it can no longer detect the waves.[6]

A lineatus uses the shape of the waveform to determine distance by analyzing how much the waveform has changed since it was generated; this amount of change is extremely predictable and regular. The surface waveform has high frequencies near source, and lower frequencies farther away due to the dampening effect of the water surface; the amount of decrease diminishes with distance.[11] A lineatus' possible use of the wavefront's curvature can be excluded since fish are still able to judge the distance of a wave's source with only a single functioning neuromast when all others have been ablated.[3][11] When presented with single-frequency or upward frequency-modulated waves, fish underestimate the distance of the wave source; this suggests the normal downward FM of capillary waves, which arises almost immediately in wave dispersion, is necessary for A lineatus to judge distance.[7] This was confirmed in 1982 by presenting fish with waves with an artificially generated waveform so that at 7 cm the wave had the downward FM sweep of a wave 15 cm away, and fish responded to these by swimming 15 cm.[11]

The neuro-anatomical basis for this ability has not yet been identified.

A lineatus and similar surface feeding fish (e.g. Pantadon bucholzi) use a slightly modified lateral line organ called a neuromast to detect surface waves. A lineatus has 18 neuromasts (specialized vibration-sensitive lateral line organs) on the dorsal surface of the head of A lineatus. These are organized into three groups by longitudinal position, and each group is bilaterally symmetric. The groups are, caudal to rostral: nasal/infraorbital (I), supraorbital (II), and supratemporal/post-orbital (III).[4][7][8]

Each neuromast is a cluster of hair-cell bundles arranged in a line and numbering in the 10s to 100s. Each bundle of hair cells is covered in a gelatinous capulla which the capillary waves actually make contact with and in doing so cause afferent neurons to fire.[14] Neuromasts are similar in structure to canal organs in the lateral line canal system: they are housed in sacs of connective tissue between the skull and skin, and are connected to the water and water surface via canals and canal pores.[7] Recent work has also revealed small ridges of tissue around each neuromast which direct water flow around it.[1]

The neuroanatomy beyond the receptor level for surface wave-detecting neuromasts has been minimally investigated. In this regard what research has been done shows considerable variation between species; in A lineatus, these neuromasts are considered the supraorbital line, and are innervated by ramus opthalmicus superficialis.[15] This tract results in collateral fibers that innervate the rostral boundary of the medial octavolateralis nucleus, the area in all teleosts where lateral line organs innervate.[16] These afferents also go to the valvula cerebelli.[17]

In one of the few electrophysiology studies performed on A lineatus, it was found that of all the primary afferents from neuromasts that they recorded, half phase-locked to wave stimuli.[8] These neurons had weaker ongoing activity than non-phase-locked neurons. With waves of decreasing amplitude, phase-locking also decreased. Phase-locking was best in the 40–70 Hz range or in the 80–100 Hz range. Within a neuromast different afferents phase-locked best to waves of different frequencies and amplitudes, and they found no correlation between a unit's dynamic amplitude range and its ability to phase lock. Analysis of data revealed that wave amplitude of waves was encoded in the degree of phase-locking and in the afferent's firing rate. Since this was the extent of the feature representation found, it was concluded that further analysis of waves must happen at higher levels in the nervous system.[8]