Hearing and Acoustic Communication in Cavefishes

摘要

The constant darkness of caves and other subterranean habitats imposessensory constraints that offer a unique opportunity to examine how sensorymodalities evolve. Adaptations to the underground environment representreplicate natural evolutionary experiments to a similar extreme environment,as many species have evolved similar morphological, physiological, andbehavioral adaptations to survive in perpetual darkness and limited resource.Although f ish hearing has been studied for over a century and all f ish up todate have been shown to be able to hear sounds, hearing in cavef ishes has notbeen well explored. Moreover, despite the diversity of sound-generatingmechanisms that have evolved across the Teleostei, acoustic communicationwas notdemonstrated in anycavef ish species. Here we review the evidence forhearing in f ishes, and particularly in cavef ishes. We also discuss our ownresults in the group Amblyopsids. We chose tostudy the Amblyopsids becausethey are a small phylogenetic group with a large portion of its diversitycomprised bycavef ish, and itsphylogenywell understood.