Burt's Blog

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 sp...

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...

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 ...

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...