January 12, 2015 — A team of scientists has identified how a “sixth sense” in fish allows them to detect flows of water, which helps resolve a long-standing mystery about how these aquatic creatures respond to their environment.
Their findings, which appear in the journal Physical Review Letters, illustrate how sensory systems evolve in accordance with physical principles while also offering a framework for understanding how sensory networks are structured.
“We identified a unique layout of flow sensors on the surface of fish that is nearly universal across species, and our research asks why this is so,” explains Leif Ristroph, an assistant professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and one of the study’s authors. “The network of these sensors is like a ‘hydrodynamic antenna’ that allows them to retrieve signals about the flow of water and use this information in different behaviors.”
The study’s other authors were James Liao, an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, and Jun Zhang, a professor of physics and mathematics at NYU and NYU Shanghai.