World Wide Neuro | Sussex Vision Series - 10/07/2020 - Tod Thiele and Emily Cooper
Channel: BadenLab
Date: 10/07/2020

World Wide Neuro (https://www.worldwideneuro.com/) is a new and ongoing effort to continue, expand and democratise neuroscience seminars.

Today, we are delighted to host a joint talk by Tod Thiele from the University of Toronto Scarborough (https://thielelab.ca/) and Emily Cooper from University of California, Berkeley (http://www.emilyacooper.org/).


Understanding the visual demands of underwater habitats for aquatic animals used in neuroscience research

Zebrafish and cichlids are popular models in visual neuroscience, due to their amenability to advanced research tools and their diverse set of visually guided behaviours. It is often asserted that animals’ neural systems are adapted to the statistical regularities in their natural environments, but relatively little is known about the visual spatiotemporal features in the underwater habitats that nurtured these fish. To address this gap, we have embarked on an examination of underwater habitats in northeastern India and Lake Tanganyika (Zambia), where zebrafish and cichlids are native. In this talk, we will describe the methods used to conduct a series of field measurements and generate a large and diverse dataset of these underwater habitats. We will present preliminary results suggesting that the demands for visually-guided navigation differ between these underwater habitats and the terrestrial habitats characteristic of other model species.