Burt's Blog

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 ...

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....

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...

Hi there! I just got back from sunny California where I attended the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) meeting! There was a lot of great research and I had a great time. I was especially excited to learn about some of the research being presented about me and my family. Check out a quick synopsis about the cichlid research that was presented at SBN 2017. JULIE BUTLER : SOCIAL STATUS AND BEHAVIORAL CONTEXT REGULATE EXPRESSION AND ACTIVATION OF TACHYKININ3A NEURONS IN THE BRAIN OF A SOCIAL AFRICAN CICHLID FISH Reproduction is really important. Neurons in my brain make sure that my reproductive system stays in tip-top shape. There’s this gene called tachykinin3 that helps regulate reproduction in mammals (like dogs, cats, and even humans!), but we don’t really know what it does in fish. Julie found that these neurons are located throughout my brain, not just in the one place that’s been so well studied in mammals. She also found that dominant males, like me, have more of th...

Hey everyone, thanks for coming back! Today I want to tell you about acoustic communication. Not only can fish hear, but a lot of us make sounds too! While we don’t actually ‘talk’, like seen in the movies, we do make sounds for a variety of reasons. Different fish produce sounds using different mechanisms, but the purpose is the same: to communicate with other nearby fish. My friend Todd the Toadfish does it to advertise his location and attract females. Like him, I produce sounds when courting the ladies1. I only make the sounds when performing a little dance, called a courtship quiver, in front of a female (click here for a video of me quivering and to hear the sounds I make). They like it. Actually, females prefer males that make sounds over those that don’t. So the more sounds I make, the more likely I am to get the ladies back to my pot! My human scientists don’t know exactly how I make sounds, but one of my cousins, Niles (a tilapia fish) makes sounds by shaking his body and c...

Hi everyone! Thanks for coming back to my blog! Today I want to talk a little about fish sensory systems. Don’t worry, I’ll focus more in depth on each sense later! Let’s see… where should I begin? Well did you know that I can see, hear, smell, and taste – just like you! My eyes work pretty similar to yours. Light is focused by a crystalline lens onto the retina. Like most fishes, I actually have really good color vision – that comes in handy when you’re really colorful like me. These bright colors can mean different things. My bright yellow coloring shows that I’m a dominant male defending a territory. Some of my friends are bright blue instead of yellow, but they’re also guarding a territory. Sometimes I have a dark bar across my eye. This is a sign of aggression, but sometimes it just means I’m stressed. I can also turn on and off a red patch on my body that I use during reproduction. I can hear sounds too! Even though I don’t have an external ear that you can see, I have an inner e...

Hi there! My name is Burt. I’m an African cichlid fish – Astatotilapia burtoni. It’s nice to meet you! You may not know this, but fish are kinda awesome. I decided to start a blog to talk about how great we are and tell you some cool biology facts about us. My friend Toni may occasionally help out too! Here’s a picture of us at the recent #SwimForScience event. First, let me tell you a little about myself. Although I was raised in the Maruska lab in good ole Baton Rouge, LA, my ancestors are originally from Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa. Back in the 1970s a group of researchers realized how awesome we were and decided to study us. Gradually my family spread out around the world. Now, some of us live in Austin, TX , Palo Alto, CA , Portland, OR , Baton Rouge, LA , College Park, MD , New York, NY , and even Europe! Using my family, researchers over the past 40 years have discovered some pretty cool stuff about fish sensory systems and how fish brains function during behaviors. Keep c...