Effects of Restraint and Immobilization on Electrosensory Behaviors of Weakly Electric Fish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Weakly electric fishes have been an important model system in behavioral neuroscience for more than 40 years. These fishes use a specialized electric organ to produce an electric field that is typically below 1 volt/cm and serves in many behaviors including social communication and prey detection. Electrical behaviors are easy to study because inexpensive and widely available tools enable continuous monitoring of the electric field of individual or groups of interacting fish. Weakly electric fish have been routinely used in tightly controlled neurophysiological experiments in which the animal is immobilized using neuromuscular blockers (e.g., curare). Although experiments that involve immobilization are generally discouraged because it eliminates movement-based behavioral signs of pain and distress, many observable electrosensory behaviors in fish persist when the animal is immobilized. Weakly electric fish thus offer a unique opportunity to assess the effects of immobilization on behaviors including those that may reflect pain and distress. We investigated the effects of both immobilization and restraint on a variety of electrosensory behaviors in four species of weakly electric fishes and observed minor effects that were not consistent between the species tested or between particular behaviors. In general, we observed small increases and decreases in response magnitude to particular electrosensory stimuli. Stressful events such as asphyxiation and handling, however, resulted in significant changes in the fishes electrosensory behaviors. Signs of pain and distress include marked reductions in responses to electrosensory stimuli, inconsistent responses, and reductions in or complete cessation of the autogenous electric field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".