Sensory Systems/Fish/Lateral Line

Tactile Sensation with Lateral Line Organs

Fish are aquatic animals with great diversity. There are over 32’000 species of fish, making it the largest group of vertebrates.

Most fish possess highly developed sense organs. The eyes of most daylight dwelling fish are capable of color vision. Some can even see ultra violet light. Fish also have a very good sense of smell. Trout for example have special holes called “nares” in their head that they use to register tiny amounts of chemicals in the water. Migrating salmon coming from the ocean use this sense to find their way back to their home streams, because they remember what they smell like. Especially ground dwelling fish have a very strong tactile sense in their lips and barbels. Their taste buds are also located there. They use these senses to search for food on the ground and in murky waters.

Fish also have a lateral line system, also known as the lateralis system. It is a system of tactile sense organs located in the head and along both sides of the body. It is used to detect movement and vibration in the surrounding water.

Function

Fish use the lateral line sense organ to sense prey and predators, changes in the current and its orientation and they use it to avoid collision in schooling.

Coombs et al. have shown [1] that the lateral line sensory organ is necessary for fish to detect their prey and orient towards it. The fish detect and orient themselves towards movements created by prey or a vibrating metal sphere even when they are blinded. When signal transduction in the lateral lines is inhibited by cobalt chloride application, the ability to target the prey is greatly diminished.

The dependency of fish on the lateral line organ to avoid collisions in schooling fish was demonstrated by Pitcher et al. in 1976, where they show that optically blinded fish can swim in a school of fish, while those with a disabled lateral line organ cannot [2].

Anatomy

The lateral lines are visible as two faint lines that run along either side of the fish body, from its head to its tail. They are made up of a series of mechanoreceptor cells called neuromasts. These are either located on the surface of the skin or are, more frequently, embedded within the lateral line canal. The lateral line canal is a mucus filled structure that lies just beneath the skin and transduces the external water displacement through openings from the outside to the neuromasts on the inside. The neuromasts themselves are made up of sensory cells with fine hair cells that are encapsulated by a cylindrical gelatinous cupula. These reach either directly into the open water (common in deep sea fish) or into the lymph fluid of the lateral line canal. The changing water pressures bend the cupula, and in turn the hair cells inside. Similar to the hair cells in all vertebrate ears, a deflection towards the shorter cilia leads to a hyperpolarization (decrease of firing rate) and a deflection in the opposite direction leads to depolarization (increase of firing rate) of the sensory cells. Therefore the pressure information is transduced to digital information using rate coding that is then passed along the lateral line nerve to the brain. By integrating many neuromasts through their afferent and efferent connections, complex circuits can be formed. This can make them respond to different stimulation frequencies and consequently coding for different parameters, like acceleration or velocity [3].

Some scales of the lateral line (center) of a Rutilus rutilus

In sharks and rays, some neuromasts have undergone an interesting evolution. They have evolved into electroreceptors called ampullae of Lorenzini. They are mostly concentrated around the head of the fish and can detect a change of electrical stimuli as small as 0.01 microvolt [4]. With this sensitive instrument these fish are able to detect tiny electrical potentials generated by muscle contractions and can thus find their prey over large distances, in murky waters or even hidden under the sand. It has been suggested that sharks also use this sense for migration and orientation, since the ampullae of Lorenzini are sensitive enough to detect the earth’s electromagnetic field.

Convergent Evolution

Cephalopods:

Cephalopods such as squids, octopuses and cuttlefish have lines of ciliated epidermal cells on head and arms that resemble the lateral lines of fish. Electrophysiological recordings from these lines in the common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) and the brief squid (Lolliguncula brevis) have identified them as an invertebrate analogue to the mechanoreceptive lateral lines of fish and aquatic amphibians [5].

Crustaceans:

Another convergence to the fish lateral line is found in some crustaceans. Contrary to fish, they don’t have the mechanosensory cells on their body, but have them spaced at regular intervals on long trailing antennae. These are held parallel to the body. This forms two ‘lateral lines’ parallel to the body that have similar properties to those of fish lateral lines and are mechanically independent of the body [6].

Mammals:

In aquatic manatees the postcranial body bears tactile hairs. They resemble the mechanosensory hairs of naked mole rats. This arrangement of hair has been compared to the fish lateral line and complement the poor visual capacities of the manatees. Similarly, the whiskers of harbor seals are known to detect minute water movements and serve as a hydrodynamic receptor system. This system is far less sensitive than the fish equivalent. [7]