PUBLICATION
Whole-field visual motion drives swimming in larval zebrafish via a stochastic process
- Authors
- Portugues, R., Haesemeyer, M., Blum, M.L., Engert, F.
- ID
- ZDB-PUB-150325-21
- Date
- 2015
- Source
- The Journal of experimental biology 218(Pt 9): 1433-43 (Journal)
- Registered Authors
- Engert, Florian
- Keywords
- none
- MeSH Terms
-
- Animals
- Poisson Distribution
- Stochastic Processes
- Swimming*
- Visual Fields*
- Zebrafish/physiology*
- PubMed
- 25792753 Full text @ J. Exp. Biol.
Citation
Portugues, R., Haesemeyer, M., Blum, M.L., Engert, F. (2015) Whole-field visual motion drives swimming in larval zebrafish via a stochastic process. The Journal of experimental biology. 218(Pt 9):1433-43.
Abstract
Caudo-rostral whole-field visual motion elicits forward locomotion in many organisms, including larval zebrafish. Here we investigate the dependence on the latency to initiate this forward swimming as a function of the speed of the visual motion: we find that it is highly dependent on the speed for slow speeds (<10 mm/s) and then plateaus for higher values. Typical latencies are >1.5 seconds, much longer than neuronal transduction processes. What mechanisms underlie these long latencies? We propose two alternative, biologically inspired models that could account for this latency to initiate swimming: an integrate and fire model, which is history dependent, and a stochastic Poisson model, which has no history dependence. We use these models to predict the behavior of larvae when presented with whole-field motion of varying speed and find that the stochastic process shows better agreement with the experimental data. Finally, we discuss possible neuronal implementations of these models.
Genes / Markers
Expression
Phenotype
Mutations / Transgenics
Human Disease / Model
Sequence Targeting Reagents
Fish
Orthology
Engineered Foreign Genes
Mapping