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Time Fries When You’re Growing Up!

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Hi everyone, Pia here! I’m a fry, which is just a fancy name for a baby fish. You might remember that my mom Toni is a mouthbrooder. That means she protects us fry in her mouth while we grow up! Before we get released from her mouth, we have yolk sacs that we use to feed ourselves and we don’t get to see or do too much – we just stay nice and protected inside mom’s mouth until we’re big enough to swim and eat on our own! Once we’re released, there’s SO much to do and see! We have to find our own food, communicate with other fish, and escape from predators back to the safety of mom’s mouth. Plus, there’s lots to see around our tank like our fancy clay pot shelters and the scientists when they come to visit! Because the environment is so different inside and outside our mom’s mouth, the scientists wanted to see which brain regions we use before and after we leave. They looked for a molecule in our brains called pS6 which tells them which neurons were “turned on” or “activated” while we w
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Fish Have Feelings Too!

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Hey guys, Tyrone here! I’m feeling down lately because I’ve been dealing with bullying a lot, especially from Burt. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how I should act when he inevitably decides to be mean to me again. Fortunately, the scientists in the lab care about my behavior and want to figure out what makes a fish susceptible or resilient to bullies like Burt! To cheer myself up, today I want to tell you all about the fun way the scientists study my behavior after repeatedly being bullied in a resident-intruder experiment (if you don’t remember the details check out my previous blog posts about this!). The scientists start with videos of these experiments to quantify our behavior. They specifically want to see how the intruder (like me, Tyrone) reacts to aggression from the resident (like Burt). By using a cool program called BORIS (which stands for B ehavioral O bservation R esearch I nteractive S oftware) they are able to see just how often and for how long we display certa
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Immune System to the Rescue!

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Hey guys! It's Burt back again with another exciting post. Sorry it’s been a while! I’ve been busy taking care of Toni as she has been sick for the past few weeks. I hope you all have been able to stay healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, we get sick just like humans, although our response to a pathogen is a bit different. You see, our immune systems are split into two types of responses; innate and adaptive. Innate immune responses are the body’s general immediate response to a pathogen, while the adaptive response works more slowly and is more specific. This means that adaptive immunity mounts responses that are specific to the type of pathogen attacking the body while the innate immune response generally fights pathogens the same way regardless of the type or class of pathogen threatening it. If we compare innate and adaptive immunity to COVID-19, the innate response would be similar to the first responders, like doctors and nurses that work extremely hard to trea
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The Power of Art and Science Working Together!

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Hello everyone, Tyrone here to give you an update on our exciting science comic! One of the scientists named Rose worked really hard to ink all 20 pages of the comic recently. Now that it’s done, they’ve been able learn some interesting things from students who have read it I wanted to share it with you all! Just a quick reminder from a previous blog, scientists gave a pre- and post- questionnaire to students chosen to read certain materials to see whether or not there’s a difference in their attitudes towards science and how much they learn from a comic book versus more traditional formats. Students were randomly selected to read either: 1) a scientific journal article, 2) a ‘news-type’ summary of that article, 3) the comic book, or 4) nothing (the control group). The comic (of course starring myself, Burt, Toni, and Gilgamesh), journal article, and ‘news-type’ summary all told the story of how social defeat in us males has impacts on our behavior and brain, similar to what the scient
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Believe it or not, bullying is not only bad for humans – but fish too!

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Hello, Tyrone here! You know what’s not fun? – Being bullied and harassed over long periods of time. I’ve been picked on by dominant males before, especially Burt, and because of it I wanted to better understand the effects of this constant bullying on the behavior, brain, and overall health of a fish like me. Luckily, the scientists are interested in this too! They study the effects of repeated bullying using something called a resident-intruder paradigm. Males of our species are either dominant (like Burt) or subordinate (like me, Tyrone). Dominant males are brightly colored and aggressively defend their territory from rival males like me. In a resident-intruder paradigm, there is a tank divided into two territories by a solid barrier. One side contains an intruder male, and the other side contains a resident dominant male who is slightly larger than the intruder. If you place the intruder male into the resident male’s territory, he will be socially defeated by that resident. What do
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All the Noise, Noise, Noise!!

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Hello fans! Toni asked me, Burt, to tell you all about this new study she and her other gal pals were involved in, and I have to admit it’s pretty cool! Did you know that underwater noise pollution has been increasing over the past few decades?  With more and more noise from boats, underwater drilling, and other human-generated activities, it’s getting pretty noisy for us fishes and other aquatic animals! So how does this underwater noise affect our behaviors and physiology you ask? Well, as usual, the scientists designed an experiment to test how noise impacted the ladies when they were mouthbrooding. They played loud noises from an underwater speaker during the mouth brood period and found that it impaired maternal care behaviors in mothers because lots of them either ate their babies or prematurely spit them out! These mothers also had high levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, and different expression levels of genes involved in maternal care behaviors and feeding in a specif
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Science Comics Anyone?

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Hello everyone! Tyrone, here! I’m sure you all love reading Burt’s blog, but what if things got a bit more artsy around here? I’m excited to announce my upcoming masterpiece in the making – a comic book starring myself, Toni, Burt and some friendly new fish faces. Why a comic book you ask? While Burt uses writing and this blog to share what he and the scientists are up to, I’m more of a visual guy. I LOVE comics!!! But most people assume they’re restricted to superheros or one style of art (although a Superfish sounds pretty awesome). Comics are actually a sequential art where the shape, size, and relationship between panels conveys just as much information as the text itself. They’re really good at portraying abstract concepts in science that are difficult to convey with words – so I thought I’d give it a try! I’ve turned a big wordy science article published in the Maruska lab into a comic for you readers. I’ve worked really hard storyboarding and sketching a draft for you all. I’ve
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Brains & Baby Care, Short Stories from the Geaux Girl Fish Power Group!

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Hey y’all, it’s Toni here!  Now that the boys Burt and Tyrone are done telling you about their cool news, me and the gals have some even cooler updates for you! The scientists have been pretty busy learning some new things about the brains of us females. Sit back, grab some popcorn, and I’ll tell you 3 different short stories from the Geaux Girl Fish Power group! Story #1: So you may remember that us females are mouthbrooders and we hold our developing babies inside our mouths for a couple of weeks. It’s kind of a drag because during this time, we can’t eat, because we’re such good mothers and we don’t want to eat our kids!, so we’re essentially in a starvation mode. But how do our brains control these behaviors of feeding and caring for our babies? Well, the researchers did an experiment to identify which regions of our brain were involved in feeding compared to maternal care. To do this, they used a neural activation marker called pS6 (they mentioned what that stood for, but it’s not
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Model Fish & Model Brains!: Burt’s 3D Printing Adventure

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Hello! It’s Burt again. Today, my researcher friends took me outside the lab for a photoshoot. My friends wanted to be able to look at us cichlids outside of the water (why anyone would want to go there, I don’t know). They told us they wanted to make a 3D model of our species, and they chose me to be their study template! We visited LSU’s Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) office and the LSU Engineering Department, where they had me waggle my tailfin for their 3D scanner, and I learned about the 3D scanning and printing process. 3D scanning is the process of using a laser and cameras to analyze an object’s shape, size, and color. As the laser moves over the object, the cameras record the change in distance of the laser. The computer then uses the data to make small triangles or squares in 3D space, in what is called a “point cloud” model. Information from one side isn’t enough, so the scientists asked me to spin around for them so they could take images from lots of angles! Aft
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Burt and Tyrone have Different Smelly Brains!

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Now that you know we also use pee and olfactory signals to communicate with each other, I want to tell you about another experiment designed to test how the neurons in our brain work to understand these smells.  The scientists put these little needles called electrodes in specific regions of our brain, and then pass water that contains different types of smells (or odors) over our noses to see how our brain responds.  When the neuron they’re recording from gets important information from our olfactory epithelium, it fires what’s called an ‘action potential’ (this is caused by ions like sodium and potassium crossing the cell membrane through channels). The researchers can then compare this firing activity after application of these different smells to determine which ones might be most important to us! In the first experiments, they’re doing these recordings in us males.  Right now, I’m a dominant male, meaning that I successfully defend my territory, mate with the ladies, and sport thi
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I’ve got sickness on my mind…

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Hey guys! It’s Burt again back with more fun science for you to explore. Last time I told you a little about smell and how it helps me communicate with Toni and other fish in my environment. We saw how the delivery and reception of chemical odorants dissolved in the water are important in mediating social interactions. Just as it’s important for me to communicate with Toni and other fish, it’s also important that systems throughout my body are able to communicate between each other, particularly the immune and nervous systems. Just like you, my brain allows me to take in information from my environment, process it, and produce an appropriate response. Although this process takes a lot of energy, I’m able to do this fairly well, which is great because I need to perform a variety of behaviors like finding food, dancing for the ladies, defending my territory, and protecting myself from predators. But recently, I’ve been more concerned with how well I’ll be able to perform these basic func
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OOOooh that smell! Can’t you smell that smell!?

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Hello everyone! Today I want to tell you about how I smell my world! You see fish live in water (duh!), which means we constantly smell all of the dissolved odorants that are in the water around us while we swim around. In fact, we use smell for almost everything! I use it for finding food, avoiding becoming food (predator avoidance), navigating, and even finding mates or avoiding other males that may want to fight. Fishes have a sensitive “nose” comprised of an olfactory epithelium full of olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) that detect all kinds of different smells. Each type of neuron detects a certain “type” of smell. For example, ones called ‘crypt neurons’ detect pheromones (which help me find my special friend Toni! ;)). Each of these different types of ORNs sends signals to a specific region in my olfactory bulb at the very front of my brain. You see, my olfactory bulb is a sorting center for all of these different kinds of smells. From there, the signals go on to other parts of
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Looking on the bright side of a long snowy winter

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Greetings from Minnesota! That’s right, Toni and I took a trip to the tundra! Why? Well we’re visiting some friends up here in Dr. Allen Mensinger’s lab at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. They’re helping Julie check our vision using this technique called electroretinograms (but more on that in a minute!). If you haven’t already noticed, I’m pretty awesome and brightly colored. And I do this little dance for Toni when I’m trying to get her to spawn with me. Like a lot of animals, we primarily use visual signals during reproduction. When I’m ready to mate, or around Toni when she’s ready to mate, I produce A LOT more of these visual signals (check out some of them in this picture!). But what my humans are interested in testing is if Toni’s ability to detect my dance and colors changes with her reproductive state. We already know she can probably hear me better when she’s ready to mate (read about that here), but maybe she can see me better too!! How cool would that be?!?! They’ve
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Balancing Act

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Hi everyone! It’s Toni again! Last time I talked about mouth brooding and how I carry my developing young in my mouth. As they develop and grow, they also increase in weight. This affects my buoyancy… Imagine having a weight strapped to just one side of your body! You’d probably walk a little crooked. Luckily, I have a way to fix this so my kids don’t bring me down (literally, and face-first)! The humans took me on a field trip to the LSU Museum on Natural Science where they got to work with a really cool guy named Prosanta Chakrabarty (he’s an Ichthyologist, or scientist that studies fishes). Once there, they took x-ray images of me and my friends. Some of us were gravid (that means we have big eggs and are ready-to-reproduce). Others were mouth brooding, and some of my friends were in between (or recovering). When they looked at these pictures, they noticed that the swim bladder, an air-filled sac in the body, looked different depending on our reproductive state. The swim bladder h
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Extreme maternal care

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Hey Y’ALL! (there’s that Louisiana vocab again!).  It’s Toni here, and in this post I want to share some more about some cool research looking at our maternal care behaviors.  Last time, I told you about how us females are mouth brooders, which means we hold our babies inside our mouths for ~2 weeks until they’re fully developed and can swim out on their own. During this time, we can’t really eat, so we’re pretty much starving and lose lots of weight, all to keep our babies happy and healthy! – this is extreme maternal care at its best!  Since we’re pretty hungry, we swim up to the food dropped in our tanks but stop ourselves before eating it when we remember those little guys already in our mouths.  As the babies get bigger, they get heavier too and to keep ourselves from doing a nosedive to the bottom, some adjustments are made in our swim bladders to keep us swimming straight (but that’s a story for another time!).  Anyway, once the babies are grown, we open our mouths and they swim
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The lateral line – my superpower

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Hi there! For this post, I want to talk about dancing. That’s right folks, I perform a little dance when I’m trying to get Toni or the other ladies to hang out with me. I also do this move called a “lateral display” where I make myself look really big and shake my body at other males to threaten them. When I fight with other males, we push around a lot of water at each other. If we can’t resolve our fight with these behaviors, then we go to the more dangerous behaviors, like biting each other. See fish have this thing called the mechanosensory lateral line. It’s composed of these little bundles, called neuromasts, that are on my skin or inside canals beneath my skin. These neuromasts have little hair cells on them that are covered by a jelly-like mass called the cupula. When something near me moves in the water, it creates water motion that deflects the cupula over these neuromasts and opens mechanically gated ion channels on the hair cells. This information then gets sent to my brain.
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Geaux girl fish power!

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Hello everyone! I’m Burt’s friend Toni and I want to tell you a little more about us females – Geaux girl fish power! (a bit of Louisiana is creeping into my vocabulary!). While Burt and his other male territorial buddies are really colorful, us ladies are less flashy and we often hang out with the subordinate males (those without a territory). Burt and his macho friends often chase us around, and when the time is right, they also do all kinds of other crazy things in front of us! When our eggs grow large in our ovaries, our bellies get swollen, we have an urge to get rid of them, and we release some chemicals into the water that makes the males do awesome courtship dances. They get really bright colors, quiver their bodies, and make grunt-like sounds in front of us, and then they turn around and wag their tails as they swim towards their territory shelter – they really want us to follow them! When one of us girls agrees to follow him, we go into his territory and lay some of our large
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Hormones, brain, and behavior – A review of SBN 2017!

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Hi there! I just got back from sunny California where I attended the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) meeting! There was a lot of great research and I had a great time. I was especially excited to learn about some of the research being presented about me and my family. Check out a quick synopsis about the cichlid research that was presented at SBN 2017. JULIE BUTLER : SOCIAL STATUS AND BEHAVIORAL CONTEXT REGULATE EXPRESSION AND ACTIVATION OF TACHYKININ3A NEURONS IN THE BRAIN OF A SOCIAL AFRICAN CICHLID FISH Reproduction is really important. Neurons in my brain make sure that my reproductive system stays in tip-top shape. There’s this gene called tachykinin3 that helps regulate reproduction in mammals (like dogs, cats, and even humans!), but we don’t really know what it does in fish. Julie found that these neurons are located throughout my brain, not just in the one place that’s been so well studied in mammals. She also found that dominant males, like me, have more of th
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