Visual Threat Assessment and Reticulospinal Encoding of Calibrated Responses in Larval Zebrafish.

ABSTRACT: All visual animals must decide whether approaching objects are a threat. Our current understanding of this process has identified a proximity-based mechanism where an evasive maneuver is triggered when a looming stimulus passes a subtended visual angle threshold. However, some escape strategies are more costly than others, and so it would be beneficial to additionally encode the level of threat conveyed by the predator's approach rate to select the most appropriate response. Here, using naturalistic rates of looming visual stimuli while simultaneously monitoring escape behavior and the recruitment of multiple reticulospinal neurons, we find that larval zebrafish do indeed perform a calibrated assessment of threat. While all fish generate evasive maneuvers at the same subtended visual angle

SUBMITTER: Bhattacharyya K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5703209 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature