MARE researcher leads pioneering study on the simultaneous development of vocalisation production and processing in fish
MARE researcher Raquel Vasconcelos led a pioneering study in the field of acoustic biology: she demonstrated how vocalisation processing develops in parallel with sound production in a species of fish. 
A fundamental issue in understanding acoustic communication systems is how auditory processing develops in relation to vocal differentiation. Although the development of auditory processing of vocalisations in bird species has already been studied, this is still an unexplored area in fish. For this reason, a team of researchers from MARE led by researcher Raquel Vasconcelos conducted the first study in this group of animals, using the Lusitanian toadfish (Halobatrachus didactylus) as a model.
The Lusitanian toadfish, also known as Xarroco, is well known for its ability to emit a wide variety of sounds, such as whistles, grunts and croaks, which it uses to attract females or warn off other males attempting to invade its territory. As such, based on the technique of recording auditory evoked potentials (which allows the evaluation of the brain's electrical response to sounds transmitted by the auditory nerves), the team evaluated the differences in the auditory representation of various sounds: whistles (reproductive, agonistic and juvenile calls) and territorial grunts between groups of fish of different sizes.
The results showed clear improvements in the development of latency, duration and detection of amplitude modulation of these calls throughout the fish's life stages, indicating that Xarrocos have the ability to refine auditory discrimination of social signals through ontogeny.
‘Auditory processing plays a critical role in social communication, as it allows animals to extract, interpret, and respond to complex characteristics of signals that convey information about individual quality, motivation, and mate choice,’ Raquel Vasconcelos explained to MARE. ‘These findings suggest that such a mechanism is conserved among vocal vertebrates, thereby increasing our understanding of how communication systems evolve and develop across taxa.’
In short, this study represents a significant advance in understanding the mechanisms of acoustic communication in fish, opening up new perspectives for the comparative study of the neurobiology of animal communication and reinforcing the role of fish as essential models for unravelling the evolutionary origins of sound communication.
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Text by Patrícia Carvalho