Meeting Abstract
The mechanosensory lateral line system (LLS) of fishes is fundamental for detecting water movements and functions in schooling, orienting in currents, locating prey, and detecting and evading predators. However, less is known about its role in social interactions. Previous work in our lab showed that Astatotilapia burtoni males use mechanosensory information to mediate male-male territorial interactions. Many fishes also produce water movements during reproductive interactions, but little is known about the role of the lateral line system in reproduction in any of the ~30,000 fish species. To understand the importance of mechanoreception in reproductive contexts, we compared behavioral interactions and neural activation patterns between LLS-intact and LLS-ablated females exposed to intact males. Our data shows that males are less-likely to court LLS-ablated females, who are then less-likely to positively respond to those courtship attempts. Spawning also occurred less often in trials with LLS-ablated females, illustrating that lateral line information is important for reproductive success. To investigate neural processing of reproductively-relevant mechanosensory information, brains were collected after behavior trials and stained for the immediate-early gene cfos as an indicator for neural activation. LLS-ablated and LLS-intact females had different activation patterns in some sensory and socially-relevant brain regions. These results reveal that mechanosensory information is also processed in known socially-relevant regions. This study is the first to integrate behavioral and neural activation analyses to show the importance of the lateral line system in mediating reproductive communication in any fish species.
