Burt's Blog

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...