The lateral line – my superpower
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.