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2021 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Jacob Engelmann ◽  
Avner Wallach ◽  
Leonard Maler

Author(s):  
Muhammed Seyda Comertler ◽  
Ismail Uyanik

Abstract Many animal behaviors are robust to dramatic variations in morphophysiological features, both across and within individuals. The control strategies that animals use to achieve such robust behavioral performances are not known. Recent evidence suggests that animals rely on sensory feedback rather than precise tuning of neural controllers for robust control. Here we examine the structure of sensory feedback, including multisensory feedback, for robust control of animal behavior. We re-examined two recent datasets of refuge tracking responses of Eigenmannia virescens, a species of weakly electric fish. Eigenmannia rely on both the visual and electrosensory cues to track the position of a moving refuge. The datasets include experiments that varied the strength of visual and electrosensory signals. Our analyses show that increasing the salience (perceptibility) of visual or electrosensory signals resulted in more robust and precise behavioral responses. Further, we find that robust performance was enhanced by multisensory integration of simultaneous visual and electrosensory cues. These findings suggest that engineers may achieve better system performance by improving the salience of multisensory feedback rather than solely focusing on precisely tuned controllers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 224 (22) ◽  
Author(s):  
Te K. Jones ◽  
Kathryne M. Allen ◽  
Cynthia F. Moss

ABSTRACT Animals that rely on electrolocation and echolocation for navigation and prey detection benefit from sensory systems that can operate in the dark, allowing them to exploit sensory niches with few competitors. Active sensing has been characterized as a highly specialized form of communication, whereby an echolocating or electrolocating animal serves as both the sender and receiver of sensory information. This characterization inspires a framework to explore the functions of sensory channels that communicate information with the self and with others. Overlapping communication functions create challenges for signal privacy and fidelity by leaving active-sensing animals vulnerable to eavesdropping, jamming and masking. Here, we present an overview of active-sensing systems used by weakly electric fish, bats and odontocetes, and consider their susceptibility to heterospecific and conspecific jamming signals and eavesdropping. Susceptibility to interference from signals produced by both conspecifics and prey animals reduces the fidelity of electrolocation and echolocation for prey capture and foraging. Likewise, active-sensing signals may be eavesdropped, increasing the risk of alerting prey to the threat of predation or the risk of predation to the sender, or drawing competition to productive foraging sites. The evolutionary success of electrolocating and echolocating animals suggests that they effectively counter the costs of active sensing through rich and diverse adaptive behaviors that allow them to mitigate the effects of competition for signal space and the exploitation of their signals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Pedraja ◽  
Hendrik Herzog ◽  
Jacob Engelmann ◽  
Sarah Nicola Jung

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. We demonstrate the usefulness by applying the approach to the analysis of dyadic interactions of Gnathonemus petersii. Coupling of the proposed methods with a boundary element modeling approach, we are thereby able to model the information gained and provided during agonistic encounters. The data indicate that the passive electrosensory input, in particular, provides sufficient information to localize a contender during the pre-contest phase, fish did not use or rely on the theoretically also available sensory information of the contest outcome-determining size difference between contenders before engaging in agonistic behavior.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 1189
Author(s):  
Rehab Ali Ibrahim ◽  
Laith Abualigah ◽  
Ahmed A. Ewees ◽  
Mohammed A. A. Al-qaness ◽  
Dalia Yousri ◽  
...  

With the widespread use of intelligent information systems, a massive amount of data with lots of irrelevant, noisy, and redundant features are collected; moreover, many features should be handled. Therefore, introducing an efficient feature selection (FS) approach becomes a challenging aim. In the recent decade, various artificial methods and swarm models inspired by biological and social systems have been proposed to solve different problems, including FS. Thus, in this paper, an innovative approach is proposed based on a hybrid integration between two intelligent algorithms, Electric fish optimization (EFO) and the arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA), to boost the exploration stage of EFO to process the high dimensional FS problems with a remarkable convergence speed. The proposed EFOAOA is examined with eighteen datasets for different real-life applications. The EFOAOA results are compared with a set of recent state-of-the-art optimizers using a set of statistical metrics and the Friedman test. The comparisons show the positive impact of integrating the AOA operator in the EFO, as the proposed EFOAOA can identify the most important features with high accuracy and efficiency. Compared to the other FS methods whereas, it got the lowest features number and the highest accuracy in 50% and 67% of the datasets, respectively.


Author(s):  
Till Raab ◽  
Sercan Bayezit ◽  
Saskia Erdle ◽  
Jan Benda

Animals across species compete for limited resources. While in some species competition behavior is solely based on own abilities, others assess their opponents to facilitate these interactions. Using cues and communication signals, contestants gather information about their opponent, adjust their behavior accordingly, and can thereby avoid high costs of escalating fights. We tracked electrocommunication signals, in particular “rises”, and agonistic behaviors of the gymnotiform electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus instaged competition experiments. A larger body-size relative to the opponent was the sole significant predictor for winners. Sex and the frequency of the continuously emitted electric field were only mildly influencing competition outcome. In males, correlations of body-size and winning were stronger than in females and, especially when losing against females, communication and agonistic interactions were enhanced, hinting towards males being more motivated to compete. Fish that lost competitions emitted the majority of rises, whereby their quantity depended on the competitors’ relative size and sex. The emission of rises was costly since it provoked ritualized biting or chasing behaviors by the other fish. Despite winners being accurately predictable based on rise numbers already after the initial 25 minutes, losers continued to emit rises. The number of rises emitted by losers and the duration of chasing behaviors depended in similar ways on physical attributes of contestants. The detailed evaluation of these correlations hint towards A. leptorhynchus adjusting their competition behavior according to mutual assessment, where rises could signal a loser's motivation to continue assessment through ritualized fighting.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent D. Dunlap ◽  
Haley M. Koukos ◽  
Boris P. Chagnaud ◽  
Harold H. Zakon ◽  
Andrew H. Bass

The communication behaviors of vocal fish and electric fish are among the vertebrate social behaviors best understood at the level of neural circuits. Both forms of signaling rely on midbrain inputs to hindbrain pattern generators that activate peripheral effectors (sonic muscles and electrocytes) to produce pulsatile signals that are modulated by frequency/repetition rate, amplitude and call duration. To generate signals that vary by sex, male phenotype, and social context, these circuits are responsive to a wide range of hormones and neuromodulators acting on different timescales at multiple loci. Bass and Zakon (2005) reviewed the behavioral neuroendocrinology of these two teleost groups, comparing how the regulation of their communication systems have both converged and diverged during their parallel evolution. Here, we revisit this comparison and review the complementary developments over the past 16 years. We (a) summarize recent work that expands our knowledge of the neural circuits underlying these two communication systems, (b) review parallel studies on the action of neuromodulators (e.g., serotonin, AVT, melatonin), brain steroidogenesis (via aromatase), and social stimuli on the output of these circuits, (c) highlight recent transcriptomic studies that illustrate how contemporary molecular methods have elucidated the genetic regulation of social behavior in these fish, and (d) describe recent studies of mochokid catfish, which use both vocal and electric communication, and that use both vocal and electric communication and consider how these two systems are spliced together in the same species. Finally, we offer avenues for future research to further probe how similarities and differences between these two communication systems emerge over ontogeny and evolution.


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