Looking on the bright side of a long snowy winter

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 done a whole bunch of things to look at this, but the electroretinograms are the final step! We got shipped up here about a week before Julie so that we could acclimate to our new temporary home. And boy is it different! It’s all white outside. I overheard Julie talking excitedly about this thing called “snow”. Apparently, it’s really cold and wet and doesn’t really exist in south Louisiana. We African cichlids don’t know anything about cold. Or snow. Luckily they gave us some heaters so we can stay nice and toasty while the humans freeze.

But anyways, back to the science. So once Julie got here, we got to work! The first step was to make electrodes. They took these teeny tiny wires and soldered them to little metal rods. Once they have the electrodes, they’re ready to start! We get put in this dark room, and the electrodes get inserted into our retina. Then they let is sit in the dark for a long time so we become fully “dark-adapted”. You know how when you go outside to look at the stars it can take a while before your eyes adjust and you can see them? Adjusting to the dark can take a while. So we had to sit there in the dark for at least 30 minutes, but sometimes longer! After that, they flash our eyes with lights of different colors! The electrodes record the response of our retina to each of the wavelengths of light that they’re testing. So they’re comparing the responses of Toni and her friends at different reproductive states. I’m excited to hear about what they find!

We’re heading back to good ole Louisiana soon. While Dr. Mensinger and his lab are great, I miss my friends back in LA. Can’t wait to tell them about this magical thing called snow!

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