Lab report formal(2) - Sensation and Perception: Electric...


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Sensation and Perception: Electric Fish Exploring Jamming Avoidance Response and Just Noticeable Difference in Eigenmannia Alex Lin Oct 15, 2009 NOTE TO EDITOR: I’m not sure if the procedure part is correct. I gave directions for replicating the lab completely, not summarized. If I should just summarize, I’ll just redo it by Thursday. Introduction Humans mainly use the 5 basic senses to interact with the environment: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Humans cannot imagine being born lacking one or more of these senses. Just a loss of vision would be devastating. However, But there are animals out there that are born blind such as the Condylura cristata or star-nosed mole. They rely on other senses to navigate and find prey. Star-nosed moles use a combination of a highly sensitive sense of smell and touch to identify and locate prey. In a broader sense of navigating its surroundings, star-nosed moles, among other moles are found to have a sense of magnetic forces or magnetoception. Not only can humans not imagine lacking some senses, they can no t imagine having senses such as magnetoception. Another sense humans lack is thermoception , a sense common to snakes in the form of infrared vision. The organs that sense heat are linked with the snakes ocular vision to form a hybrid vision that include wavelengths of infrared and those of the visible spectrum (380-750nm). Furthermore, bats have evolved the ability of echolocation; which allow the bat to build their surroundings using re f l ected bounded sound waves. Jakob von Uexkull proposed the idea that humans must judge the behaviors and perception of other animals considering by understanding that these animals possess their own Umwelts. That is, an animals’ own sensory environment. The focus of the lab is yet another type of sense that humans lack; electroreception . There are many types of electric fish and they have their own forms of electroreception . Electrophorus electricus are the electric eels which are most commonly know n ; they use
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electroreception in the form of violent bursts of high voltage electricity which it uses to stun ning prey or to or to war n ning of predators. The species Eigenmannia are used for this experiment. Eigenmannia use electroreception primarily in electrolocation and electrocommunication ; meaning location and communication. They can identify other fish by sensing their re sp ective frequency and amplitudes. However there is no real distinction between the frequency of males and females. Age was does not give distinction to their frequencies either ( Hopkins, Carl D. 1974) . Eigenmannia produce electricity from their electric organ. The electric organ contains electrocytes that produce an electric organ discharge or discharge or an EOD . , or electric organ discharge. The EOD is basically a con tinous continuous stant electric discharge. The fish can sense any interference with the field it generates which translates to helps in interpreting its environment. Figure 1, 2.
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