Stefan Schuster
Department of Animal Physiology, University Bayreuth, Germany
A remarkable combination of skills in hunting archerfish
Archerfish are well-known for their ability to dislodge aerial prey from twigs or leaves with shots of water. A closer look reveals that their unique hunting technique comes packaged with a remarkable combination of other skills. These are needed, for instance, to spot prey, to learn which targets to choose and how to engage them. Even the act of shooting is far from being a simple all-or-none action and shows essential hallmarks of adaptive tool-use. And after a successful shot the fish have to make extremely rapid and accurate decisions to secure their prey against competitors. These rapid decisions have turned out to be surprisingly complex and accessible to behavioral analysis. They are not hardwired, can be profitably studied both in the wild and in the lab, and bear the promise of a mechanistic understanding of some of its key features, at the level of identified neurons.
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