Meeting Abstract
We collected Entomacrodus striatus, an amphibious rockskipper, from a rock jetty in Moorea, French Polynesia, and tested their jumping abilities using a flow table. Amphibious fish routinely navigate between terrestrial and aquatic habitats using either spatial mapping or visual cues to determine where to safely jump. We recorded jumping direction during three sets of trials: eleven rounds of training, three rounds of visual cue disruption testing, and two rounds of spatial memory disruption testing. During the first round of training, the fish were able to jump to safety in a novel environment, regardless of starting orientation (p < 0.001). E. striatus were able to learn the terrain after repeated conditioning and continued to jump in the same direction after we moved rocks to the opposite side of the table (p = 0.033). To test memory disruption, we injected the fish with NOS inhibitor L-NAME and found fish jumps became randomly distributed (p = 0.452). In this study, we show blackspotted rockskippers successfully navigate through a combination of both visual cues and spatial mapping while on land.
