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Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, while testing the "station keeping" functions of the glass knifefish, have created an augmented reality system that tricks the animal's electric sensing organs in real time. The fish keeps itself hidden by moving inside of its various holes/homes and the researchers wanted to understand what kind of autonomous sensing functions it used to keep itself safe.
Source: TechCrunch
To investigate, the researchers placed weakly electric fish inside an experimental tank with an artificial refuge enclosure, capable of automatically shuttling back and forth based on real time video tracking of the fish's movement. The team studied how the fish's behavior and movement in the refuge would be altered in two categories of experiments: "closed loop" experiments, whereby the fish's movement is synced to the shuttle motion of the refuge; and "open loop" experiments, whereby motion of the refuge is "replayed" to the fish as if from a tape recorder. Notably, the researchers observed that the fish swam the farthest to gain sensory information during closed loop experiments when the augmented reality system's positive "feedback gain" was turned up — or whenever the refuge position was made to mirror the movement of the fish.
[...] "It turns out the fish behave differently when the stimulus is controlled by the individual versus when the stimulus is played back to them," added Fortune. "This experiment demonstrates that the phenomenon that we are observing is due to feedback the fish receives from its own movement. Essentially, the animal seems to know that it is controlling the sensory world around it."
Source: NJIT
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fishybell on Saturday December 29 2018, @09:50PM
Lots of fish use electrical fields for various effects. The electric eel generate a strong field to stun fish, as does the electric catfish. Some fish use the electrical field of other animals to detect them; for example the hammer head shark detects crabs in the sand this way.
Knife fish generate an electric field to sense the world around it. It is referred to as a "weakly electric fish," I can only assume, because the field is only strong enough to be usable for detection purposes rather than for hunting.
All animals emit an electric field though, so technically the vast majority of fish are "weakly electric." I'm fairly certain this is not how scientists refer to the knife fish. They probably refer to them as knife fish or whatever their latin name is.