27 August 2013

Fish can communicate using electricity

Matthew E. Arnegard, Derrick J. Zwickl, Ying Lu, and Harold H. Zakon
Closely related electric fish species from the Okano River of Gabon, collected in the vicinity of the abandoned Fang village, “Na.” Each species is shown along with a recording of its electric organ discharge, which these fish use to communicate with one another and electro-locate prey, much like bats use echolocation. Electric fish recognize other members of their own species using the species-specific waveforms of these heartbeat-like discharges. NIH funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences... 
From FASEB (abbreviated, and boldface mine).  I suppose as a basic principle, there's no difference between communicating using electical waveforms vs. communicating using auditory or visual waveforms, but the idea still staggers my mind.  Fascinating.  I wonder if there is other information they can share, besides just "I am here."

6 comments:

  1. Sir, since you are amazing with grammar and the rules of writing I thought I'd ask this question: Shouldn't you put brackets around your ellipsis since it was not in the original writing? I was taught this at some point in my education and it makes sense to me. It's probably one of those thing that can be done both ways, but I was curious what your thoughts were.

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  2. *[...] curious what were your thoughts." I knew I would make a grammatical error in my own comment requesting guidance with grammar.

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    1. I typically use ... to designate an ellipsis (I think it's supposed to be four periods if it's at a sentence's end, but I don't agonize over details like that. I've never put them in brackets or parentheses, although I can understand the logic behind it, to distinguish from an ellipsis already existing at the source. There are some skilled proofreaders who browse this blog; perhaps one of them can answer that for you.

      Also I do use boldface to highlight text for emphasis and for speed-reading by the TL;DR crowd, and I don't typically specify that the boldface is mine. I think all the regular readers here recognize it as a style feature, but it could me misunderstood by the arriving-by-Google one-timer.

      In this particular case, I removed from my embed the three university affiliations of the four authors. Indicating that deletion seemed cumbersome and unnecessary when the link is available.

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  3. I just wanna know how those giants schools of fish move about and turn on the dime in complete synchronicity...

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    1. Using lateral line organs, I believe:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_line_organ

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