About

Hi everyone! My name is Burt, and I’m an African cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni. Check out my first post (“Hi! I’m Burt!”) to learn more about me. I was raised in the Maruska lab in Baton Rouge, LA. I’ll be sharing lots of cool information here about how scientists are making new discoveries by studying me and my friends. I’m a colorful macho male with a territory, so sometimes my girlfriend Toni will give you the ladies perspective too. Enjoy!

If you want to know more about those crazy scientists and their research projects, check out their website.

Burt’s Blog was created in 2017 by Julie Butler and is maintained by the Maruska Lab at Louisiana State University.

Blog Contributors:

Julie Butler (with artwork)

Karen Maruska

Karen Field

Teisha King

Brandon Tramontana

Rose Wayne (with artwork)

Alora McInnis

Emily Ray


Popular posts from this blog

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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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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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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