Lateral line system of the Lake Michigan mottled sculpin. Patches of hair cells called neuromasts (black dots) are distributed all over the body surface of the fish, either directly on the skin surface or just under the skin surface in fluid filled canals (shaded areas).
Lake Michigan mottled sculpin are nocturnal, benthic predators that approach their prey along the substrate in a saltatory fashion, stopping for several seconds after each movement until they are close enough to launch the final strike. This behavior can be elicited in the lab from blinded animals with a chemically-inert, artificial prey - a bite-size (6 mm in diameter), vibrating sphere. Thus, it is possible to drive the behavior with mechanosensory cues alone, to use the same controllable stimulus source in both physiological and behavioral experiments, and to use a set of dipole field equations for characterizing the stimulus field and for modeling stimulation patterns along lateral line canal neuromasts (see the computational modeling demo). In this demo, you will see a short video clip of a single prey capture sequence and the corresponding changes in modeled stimulation patterns to different lateral line canals on the head and body of the sculpin as it approaches the artificial prey. For further details, see: Coombs, S, J. Finneran and R.A. Conley (2000). Hydrodynamic imaging by the lateral line system of the Lake Michigan mottled sculpin. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. 355: 1111-1114