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Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish

The ability to navigate in the world is crucial to many species. One of the most fundamental unresolved issues in understanding animal navigation is how the brain represents spatial information. Although navigation has been studied extensively in many taxa, the key efforts to determine the neural ba...

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Autores principales: Givon, Shachar, Pickholtz, Renanel, Pickholtz, Eliezer Y., Ben-Shahar, Ohad, Kiflawi, Moshe, Segev, Ronen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9298462/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35874430
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2022.895381
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author Givon, Shachar
Pickholtz, Renanel
Pickholtz, Eliezer Y.
Ben-Shahar, Ohad
Kiflawi, Moshe
Segev, Ronen
author_facet Givon, Shachar
Pickholtz, Renanel
Pickholtz, Eliezer Y.
Ben-Shahar, Ohad
Kiflawi, Moshe
Segev, Ronen
author_sort Givon, Shachar
collection PubMed
description The ability to navigate in the world is crucial to many species. One of the most fundamental unresolved issues in understanding animal navigation is how the brain represents spatial information. Although navigation has been studied extensively in many taxa, the key efforts to determine the neural basis of navigation have focused on mammals, usually in lab experiments, where the allocated space is typically very small; e.g., up to one order of magnitude the size of the animal, is limited by artificial walls, and contains only a few objects. This type of setting is vastly different from the habitat of animals in the wild, which is open in many cases and is virtually limitless in size compared to its inhabitants. Thus, a fundamental open question in animal navigation is whether small-scale, spatially confined, and artificially crafted lab experiments indeed reveal how navigation is enacted in the real world. This question is difficult to study given the technical problems associated with in vivo electrophysiology in natural settings. Here, we argue that these difficulties can be overcome by implementing state of the art technology when studying the rivulated rabbitfish, Siganus rivulatus as the model animal. As a first step toward this goal, using acoustic tracking of the reef, we demonstrate that individual S. rivulatus have a defined home range of about 200 m in length, from which they seldom venture. They repeatedly visit the same areas and return to the same sleeping grounds, thus providing evidence for their ability to navigate in the reef environment. Using a clustering algorithm to analyze segments of daily trajectories, we found evidence of specific repeating patterns in behavior within the home range of individual fish. Thus, S. rivulatus appears to have the ability to carry out its daily routines and revisit places of interest by employing sophisticated means of navigation while exploring its surroundings. In the future, using novel technologies for wireless recording from single cells of fish brains, S. rivulatus can emerge as an ideal system to study the neural basis of navigation in natural settings and lead to “electrophysiology in the wild.”
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spelling pubmed-92984622022-07-21 Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish Givon, Shachar Pickholtz, Renanel Pickholtz, Eliezer Y. Ben-Shahar, Ohad Kiflawi, Moshe Segev, Ronen Front Neural Circuits Neural Circuits The ability to navigate in the world is crucial to many species. One of the most fundamental unresolved issues in understanding animal navigation is how the brain represents spatial information. Although navigation has been studied extensively in many taxa, the key efforts to determine the neural basis of navigation have focused on mammals, usually in lab experiments, where the allocated space is typically very small; e.g., up to one order of magnitude the size of the animal, is limited by artificial walls, and contains only a few objects. This type of setting is vastly different from the habitat of animals in the wild, which is open in many cases and is virtually limitless in size compared to its inhabitants. Thus, a fundamental open question in animal navigation is whether small-scale, spatially confined, and artificially crafted lab experiments indeed reveal how navigation is enacted in the real world. This question is difficult to study given the technical problems associated with in vivo electrophysiology in natural settings. Here, we argue that these difficulties can be overcome by implementing state of the art technology when studying the rivulated rabbitfish, Siganus rivulatus as the model animal. As a first step toward this goal, using acoustic tracking of the reef, we demonstrate that individual S. rivulatus have a defined home range of about 200 m in length, from which they seldom venture. They repeatedly visit the same areas and return to the same sleeping grounds, thus providing evidence for their ability to navigate in the reef environment. Using a clustering algorithm to analyze segments of daily trajectories, we found evidence of specific repeating patterns in behavior within the home range of individual fish. Thus, S. rivulatus appears to have the ability to carry out its daily routines and revisit places of interest by employing sophisticated means of navigation while exploring its surroundings. In the future, using novel technologies for wireless recording from single cells of fish brains, S. rivulatus can emerge as an ideal system to study the neural basis of navigation in natural settings and lead to “electrophysiology in the wild.” Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-07-05 /pmc/articles/PMC9298462/ /pubmed/35874430 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2022.895381 Text en Copyright © 2022 Givon, Pickholtz, Pickholtz, Ben-Shahar, Kiflawi and Segev. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Neural Circuits
Givon, Shachar
Pickholtz, Renanel
Pickholtz, Eliezer Y.
Ben-Shahar, Ohad
Kiflawi, Moshe
Segev, Ronen
Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish
title Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish
title_full Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish
title_fullStr Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish
title_full_unstemmed Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish
title_short Toward Naturalistic Neuroscience of Navigation: Opportunities in Coral Reef Fish
title_sort toward naturalistic neuroscience of navigation: opportunities in coral reef fish
topic Neural Circuits
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9298462/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35874430
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2022.895381
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