Topic: Danionella cerebrum

Many species cohesively navigate their environment as a group. This includes fish schools and shoals, where group structure emerges from social interactions, which can subsequently facilitate adaptive advantages such as collective foraging. While previous work has characterized how group structure emerges from social interactions, less is known about how collective behavior is influenced by external factors (e.g., resource availability) and internal physiological states (e.g., hunger), and their underlying behavioral and neural mechanisms. To address how collective behavior is influenced by bo

Animals exhibit a dazzling array of collective behaviors. Recent studies have characterized the neural representations of relevant behavioral variables, like conspecific-location, in such contexts. However, much less is known about the neural mechanisms mediating interactions between individuals in a group, and the sensorimotor transformations responsible for complex group behavior. To advance our understanding of the neural basis of group behaviors, we studied collective motion (‘schooling’) of micro glassfish (Danionella cerebrum). Danionella schooling emerges during the first 8 weeks post-f

Most animals are born with a minimal repertoire of behaviors, which is gradually expanded as they grow and adapt to their changing needs, environments, and body morphology. The emergence of new functional capacities is associated with changes in the brain architecture, as new neurons become functional and new connections are formed. How brain maturation orchestrates phenotypic transformations during development is still an open question in behavioral neuroscience. Here, we investigate this question in Danionella cerebrum, a novel vertebrate model whose brain remains small and transparent up to

The ability to maintain a stable state in the presence of perturbations, known as robustness, is a defining feature of living systems. Most animals demonstrate adaptability by adjusting their position when confronted with external stimuli, a crucial skill for survival. How the brain dynamically regulates behavior in response to a changing environment remains a fundamental question in neuroscience. We investigated it using Danionella cerebrum, the smallest known vertebrate amenable to brain-wide functional imaging at cellular resolution across all developmental stages. We developed a 2D virtual