Meeting Abstract
Unlike the inner ear of terrestrial vertebrates, fishes have a less pronounced separation between auditory and vestibular inner ear organs. In fishes, the inner ear is composed of three paired otolithic end organs, which are multimodal and encode auditory and vestibular stimuli. To determine the effects of vestibular (movement) and auditory (pure tones or conspecific vocalizations) input, microwire electrodes were implanted using a 3D printed micromanipulator chronically into the utricular nerve of oyster toadfish, Opsanus tau. Fish swam freely or were moved forward at variable speeds while affixed to a sled. All utricular afferents responded to movement by increasing neural activity and remained sensitive to pure tones (125 – 200 Hz) and playbacks of conspecific boatwhistles throughout movement. This research is the first to simultaneously investigate the effects of multimodal input to the utricle during self-generated movement in free-swimming fishes.
