Meeting Abstract
The maneuvers in fish schools reflect remarkable coordination. Fish within schools swim while matching speed and maintaining a specific distance from their neighbors. Fish schools can also perform complex maneuvers such as obstacle avoidance, which require quick responses to changes in velocity and direction. The mechanisms underlying this uniform schooling structure are not well understood. Fish use both vision and the flow-sensing lateral line system to maintain the structure of a school, but we do not know very much about the role of the lateral line in schooling. Previous studies have shown that one fish with a partially ablated lateral line can still school in a group of normal fish, but that it maintains a different position relative to its neighbors than the normal fish do. These studies only show the effects of a partial ablation of the lateral line and do not clearly show the effects when the entire lateral line is ablated. To examine the role of the lateral line in fish schools, we completely ablated the lateral line of individuals using gentamycin and observed their behavior as they reintegrated into a school of normal untreated fish. Lateral line hair cells regenerate from this treatment in approximately one week. As the treated fish swims within a school of normal fish, we observed the overall schooling structure and quantified the behaviors by calculating the nearest neighbor distance, bearing, and elevation between each pair of closest neighboring fish. We found that the treated fish was able to maintain a normal position within the school immediately after lateral line ablation, but the structure of the school changed over time as the hair cells regenerated. This result suggests that the fish may take time to relearn how to process the lateral line signal from the newly regenerated hair cells.
