Electric Dreams

How do you measure the movements and social interactions of exotic tropical fish swimming in the murky waters of the Amazon river basin? LIMBS lab members Dr. Manu Madhav and Ravi Jayakumar developed a new tool to do just that for weakly electric fish. With the help of former lab members Alican Demir and Sarah Stamper and in close collaboration with Dr. Eric Fortune from NJIT, Manu and Ravi developed the “grid”, an array of custom electrodes that sits just below the surface of the water, along with a custom software system that “triangulates” the locations of individual fish. This was featured in the the Johns Hopkins Magazine, Winter 2018 Edition.

The work was published in the open-access journal, Scientific Reports:

• M. S. Madhav, R. P. Jayakumar, A. Demir, S. A. Stamper, E. Fortune, and N. J. Cowan, “High-resolution behavioral mapping of electric fishes in Amazonian habitats,” Sci Rep, vol. 8, iss. 1, p. 5830, 2018.
  [Bibtex]

  @article{madhavhigh-resolution2018,
  author = {Manu S. Madhav and Ravikrishnan P. Jayakumar and
  Alican Demir and Sarah A. Stamper and Eric
  S. Fortune and Noah J. Cowan},
  title = {High-resolution behavioral mapping of electric
  fishes in Amazonian habitats},
  journal = {Sci Rep},
  number = 1,
  volume = 8,
  year = 2018,
  pages = {5830},
  doi = {10.1038/s41598-018-24035-5},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24035-5}
  }