CAREER: The energetic costs of active sensory and communication signals: Integrating research and education through organismal, cellular, and molecular approaches

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Animals sense the environment using a combination of active and passive sensory systems in order to detect and respond to external stimuli. Passive sensory systems such as vision require little energy input from the animal because the carrier signal (light) comes from the sun. Active sensory and communication systems such as echolocation in bats are advantageous because they do not require external energy sources, but these animals must expend energy to produce the acoustic carrier signal. Managing these energetic demands and responding to energy shortfalls is essential for their survival and reproductive fitness. Running out of energy to generate the signal renders the sensory system "blind" and makes it impossible to find food, respond to threats from competitors, or attract mates. The energetic demands of sensing and communicating are extreme in some species of electric fish - animals that generate and sense electric fields in the surrounding water to image their worlds and communicate in darkness. This project aims to elucidate the organizing principles that allow animals to manage and exploit energetically expensive sensory and communication channels. The investigator will adapt knowledge, software, and technical approaches developed from this project's research activities to improve science literacy and education regionally, nationally, and internationally. This project will test the hypothesis that energetic demands are a major force shaping the operation and regulation of active sensing at the organismal, cellular, and molecular levels using the weakly electric fish, Eingenmannia viriscens, as a model system. The research plan will study the electric organ discharge produced by the synchronized action potentials of specialized electric organ cells called electrocytes to (1) discover how hormones regulate electric signal intensity under normal conditions and in response to metabolic stress, (2) discover how the cells that generate the electric signal increase their energy efficiency and respond to energy shortfalls, and (3) identify molecular adaptations in the electric organ cells' ion channels and ion pumps that optimize energy utilization. This project will integrate research and education through investigating the mechanisms that allow animals to use metabolically demanding sensory and communication signals. This project's educational component will achieve four educational goals that extend the investigator's track record of integrating research and teaching: (1) expanding and improving the investigator's outreach program, "The Electric Fish Roadshow", that promotes scientific literacy in settings ranging from grade-school classrooms to retirement communities [www.markhamlab.com/outreach.html]. (2) extending the scope and distribution of grade-school and middle-school lesson plans regionally and nationally, as well as international deployment of educational software for high-school and college neurobiology classes [www.EOTNprogram.org], (3) transforming the way student scientist-educators are trained in the investigator's laboratory and, (4) developing an undergraduate laboratory class in the investigator's department that involves students directly in high-level research activities related to the project's research goals.