MBExC / SPP 2205 Lecture

Patrick Weygoldt from the Institute for Neurobiology, University of Tübingen will talk about “Signals, cues, and the problem of finding the sender: electric fish from staged contests to wild rivers” during the MBExC / SPP 2205 Lecture on July 9th, 2026 at 11:00 am at the seminar room 0.232, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 11, GZMB (https://lageplan.uni-goettingen.de/?ident=1524_2_EG_0.232).

Abstract
Communication is hard to prove. A conspicuous behavior is only a signal if it evolved to influence a receiver; otherwise, it is a cue, an informative by-product. Establishing the difference demands that we detect candidate signals, attribute them to individual senders, and show that receivers respond.
Electric fish are unusually suited to this program: they emit electric fields that can be recorded continuously and non-invasively, and whose waveforms can identify the emitter. After a short introduction to electroreception and electrocommunication, I present two recent analyses that sit at opposite ends of this pipeline: one that runs it to completion, and one still working to clear its first step.

In the lab, the chirps that Apteronotus leptorhynchus produce during competition are textbook submissive signals. Using a deep-learning pipeline to detect over 73,000 chirps across staged pairwise contests and assign each to its emitter, we tested for receiver effects directly. Chirps neither preceded the end of a chase nor predicted the dominant’s later aggression beyond a permutation null; instead, chirp rate tracked contest intensity. This makes chirps, at most, a potential cue rather than a signal, and calls for re-evaluating their textbook reading as submissive signals.

In the field, electric eels (Electrophorus voltai), long assumed to be solitary predators, have recently been reported to coordinate group hunts that herde prey into balls. Whether they communicate at all is unknown, and answering it in situ poses a formidable challenge: recovering each animal’s position from passive voltage recordings alone. Using autonomous electrode loggers and a localization model calibrated on electric-field simulations, we estimate source positions from electric organ discharges, letting us reconstruct diel patterns of habitat use in groups of wild electric eels. Here I focus on the current
advances and the limits, where tracking remains short and fragmented in dense, noisy scenes. That difficulty is not specific to eels but the general problem at its hardest: knowing who produced a signal is the first step in any communication system, and the only cue, individual variation in how each animal signals, is everywhere. Electric fish are simply where we can begin to test how far it reaches.

Host: Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf, Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks, University of Göttingen & MPI-DS

Poster of the talk: