This is an ectopic seminar hosted by the Zebrafish Groupie & is open to the UO community
Abstract: Social behavior ranges from simple pairwise interactions to thousands of individuals coordinating goal-directed movements across animal species. Regardless of the scale, these interactions are governed by multimodal sensory input that requires animals to actively attend to cues and respond appropriately for the context. We leveraged the zebrafish, a highly social and experimentally tractable model organism, to study naturalistic pairwise interactions early in development. We identified stereotyped positions and coordinated movements in interacting pairs, and generated a model to automatically classify states of active interaction. We then manipulated visual and mechanosensory cues to test the contributions of these distinct sensory inputs to behavioral states and corresponding brain activity. Whole-brain immunolabeling for recently active neurons revealed neuronal populations in the forebrain and habenula are selectively active in social contexts and predict sociality of individual pairs. Altogether, we find coordinated social interactions are reliably elicited in juvenile zebrafish early in development, and that specific social behaviors rely on different sensory modalities and distinct brain circuits.