The Geometric World of Fishes: A Synthesis on Spatial Reorientation in Teleosts.

Abstract

Simple SummaryAnimals inhabit species-specific ecological environments and acquire knowledge about the surrounding space to adaptively behave and move within it. Spatial cognition is important for achieving basic survival actions such as detecting the position of a food site or a mate, going back home or hiding from a predator. As such, animals possess multiple mechanisms for spatial mapping, including the use of individual reference points or positional relationships among them. One such mechanism allows disoriented animals to navigate according to the distinctive geometry of the environment: within a rectangular enclosure, they can simply reorient by using “metrics” (e.g., longer/shorter, closer/farther) and “sense” (e.g., left, right) attributes. Navigation based on the environmental geometry has been widely investigated across the animal kingdom, including fishes. In particular, research on teleost fish has contributed to the general understanding of geometric representations through both visual and extra-visual modalities, even vertebrates phylogenetically remote from mammals.Fishes navigate through underwater environments with remarkable spatial precision and memory. Freshwater and seawater species make use of several orientation strategies for adaptative behavior that is on par with terrestrial organisms, and research on cognitive mapping and landmark use in fish have shown that relational and associative spatial learning guide goal-directed navigation not only in terrestrial but also in aquatic habitats. In the past thirty years, researchers explored spatial cognition in fishes in relation to the use of environmental geometry, perhaps because of the scientific value to compare them with land-dwelling animals. Geometric navigation involves the encoding of macrostructural characteristics of space, which are based on the Euclidean concepts of “points”, “surfaces”, and “boundaries”. The current review aims to inspect the extant literature on navigation by geometry in fishes, emphasizing both the recruitment of visual/extra-visual strategies and the nature of the behavioral task on orientation performance.