Journal article
Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment
- Abstract:
- Distance travelled is a crucial metric that underpins an animal’s ability to navigate in the short-range. While there is extensive research on how terrestrial animals measure travel distance, it is unknown how animals navigating in aquatic environments estimate this metric. A common method used by land animals is to measure optic flow, where the speed of self-induced visual motion is integrated over the course of a journey. Whether freely-swimming aquatic animals also measure distance relative to a visual frame of reference is unclear. Using the marine fish Rhinecanthus aculeatus, we show that teleost fish can use visual motion information to estimate distance travelled. However, the underlying mechanism differs fundamentally from previously studied terrestrial animals. Humans and terrestrial invertebrates measure the total angular motion of visual features for odometry, a mechanism which does not vary with visual density. In contrast, the visual odometer used by Rhinecanthus acuelatus is strongly dependent on the visual density of the environment. Odometry in fish may therefore be mediated by a movement detection mechanism akin to the system underlying the optomotor response, a separate motion-detection mechanism used by both vertebrates and invertebrates for course and gaze stabilisation.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 749.9KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s42003-022-03925-5
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Communications Biology More from this journal
- Volume:
- 5
- Article number:
- 1045
- Publication date:
- 2022-10-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-08-31
- DOI:
- ISSN:
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2399-3642
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1279951
- Local pid:
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pubs:1279951
- Deposit date:
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2022-09-27
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Karlsson et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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