Different animals exhibit different behaviors: some move as fast as a cheetah, some are slow like a
sloth. Some communicate with high frequency, loud tones, others with low frequency, quiet ones. In
order to understand how such different behaviors can be generated by the nervous systems of different
animals, we want to investigate the adaptations of nerve cells to different behaviors in this project.
Piranhas allow us to study two different motor-behaviors within one species. They create neural patterns
in their spinal cord that lead to either slow muscle contractions for locomotion or very rapid muscle
contractions to create sounds for acoustic communication.
The two separate but locally close neural networks in the spinal cord allow us to obtain a direct
comparison of the nerve cells involved in the generation of vocal communication and locomotion,
respectively. Therefore, we can investigate not only the different adaptations of the cells but also the
neuronal networks activating such distinctive motor patterns in one animal model. The results of this
project will help us to understand how these networks can develop in time to control different behaviors.