In a project jointly led by the Kunes and Engert laboratories, co-first authors Caroline Wee, Erin Song, and Maxim Nikitchenko used the larval zebrafish to take a deep dive into how social cues are represented in the brain and how those cues modulate behavior. Their results appear in a paper published this week in Nature Communications (PDF).
Social interactions are an essential aspect of human experience, and the absence of social stimuli often leads to a sense of loneliness, pain, and anxiety. Similarly, in animals, social isolation or stimulation have profound influences on behavior. The larval zebrafish is no different. However, when larval zebrafish perceive visual or mechanosensory stimuli indicating the presence of other unrelated fish, they tend to swim away, avoiding the social stimuli (e.g. Harpaz et al, 2021). However, larval zebrafish have been previously shown to swim near olfactory cues signaling the presence of kin (Gerlach and Wullimann 2021).
