Meeting Abstract
When responding to acute threats such as an attacking predator, animals must rapidly filter and integrate diverse sensory cues to produce a robust escape response. In fish, this is accomplished at least in part through a set of neural circuits in the brain, which, when triggered, produce a reflex-like flight response. While these flight responses have been studied in detail in the laboratory, studying responses of fish in the wild has proven far more challenging. We developed an experimental platform for performing behavioral experiments on wild, freely swimming fish. We show that a combination of visual and acoustic stimuli reliably trigger short-latency escape responses in a diverse range of fish species, but that these responses are continually modulated based on incoming sensory input, allowing fish to produce robust but flexible reactions to threats.
