Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Waddell, Joseph C.
• Rodríguez-Cattáneo, Alejo
• Caputi, Angel A.
• Crampton, William G.R.

Titel

Electric organ discharges and near-field spatiotemporal patterns of the electromotive force in a sympatric assemblage of Neotropical electric knifefish

Ist Teil von

• Journal of physiology, Paris, 2016-10, Vol.110 (3), p.164-181

Ort / Verlag

France: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •High diversity of head-to-tail electric organ discharges (EODs) among nine congeners.•High interspecific diversity of the electromotive force EOD (emf-EOD) pattern.•Rostro-caudal functional specialization of the electric organ is documented.•Emf-EOD pattern appears in some cases to be species and/or sex specific.•Data support an active electroreception role for ampullary electroreceptors. Descriptions of the head-to-tail electric organ discharge (ht-EOD) waveform – typically recorded with electrodes at a distance of approximately 1–2 body lengths from the center of the subject – have traditionally been used to characterize species diversity in gymnotiform electric fish. However, even taxa with relatively simple ht-EODs show spatiotemporally complex fields near the body surface that are determined by site-specific electrogenic properties of the electric organ and electric filtering properties of adjacent tissues and skin. In Brachyhypopomus, a pulse-discharging genus in the family Hypopomidae, the regional characteristics of the electric organ and the role that the complex ‘near field’ plays in communication and/or electrolocation are not well known. Here we describe, compare, and discuss the functional significance of diversity in the ht-EOD waveforms and near-field spatiotemporal patterns of the electromotive force (emf-EODs) among a species-rich sympatric community of Brachyhypopomus from the upper Amazon.