Most animals, including ourselves, use different senses to interact with the world around us. We integrate information from vision, smell, and other sensory modalities to gather information about the quality of our environment and guide our behaviour. But this information has far greater potential: in the developing animal, the environment can be used as a rich source of information on what to expect from the postnatal world. Amazingly, animals can use this information to tune their physiology and hence behaviour as they develop to adjust to the prevailing conditions after birth. This ‘developmental programming’ is widespread, having been found in insects, arachnids, and many vertebrates.
There is evidence that embryos of several species can directly perceive and differentiate environmental cues during the pre-natal period using their senses. For example, work undertaken by Professor Spencer has shown that avian embryos can discriminate between different acoustic stimuli in ovo. This may seem surprising given the undeveloped nature of an embryo. However, this ability could be key to survival. In this example, embryos showed significantly higher heart rate responses to alarm calls of their own species compared to other call types, potentially recognising the important message conveyed by such calls: danger.
How the brain’s perception of the quality of the environment then changes the development of the animal is still poorly understood. An important factor that has held back researchers is the fact that it is difficult to measure how the environment affects the activity within the brain, and how this relates to postnatal behaviour. This project aims to rectify this using an integrative approach encompassing experimental neuroscience, physiology, behavioural ecology and mathematical modelling. We will use the embryonic zebrafish as a model organism, since its transparency means we can image in awake behaving animals the activity of neurons across the brain – including in those that process different sensory cues. The project's importance lies in gaining a fundamental understanding of how embryonic brains perceive stimuli from different senses and how these translate into programmed phenotypic changes in post-natal life. This will also give us important insights relevant to the welfare of managed animals.
Moreover, further impact of this work lies in the potential for us to model what types of cues can be effective signals of environmental quality. When environments degrade these multi-modal cues change and our integrative approach will enable us to re-create degraded habitats and determine the impact on post-natal survival and resilience. Of all the species listed as vulnerable or declining in the World today the majority are egg-laying. These species, which comprise 99% of the species on Earth, are particularly sensitive to external cues during pre-natal development since their embryos develop within an egg kept external to the mother. Since we study a model fish species this project could significantly enhance our ability to determine interventions that could limit the impacts of degraded habitats on populations.
The project is supervised by Dr Maarten Zwart, who has an interest in the neural circuits that drive behaviour using Drosophila and zebrafish; Prof Karen Spencer, who is interested in the links between the brain, physiology, and behaviour; and Prof David Dritschel, who combines the theoretical analysis and numerical computation in the study of fundamental aspects of fluid dynamics. It combines Prof Spencer’s work on in ovo adaptation in birds with the technical expertise in the Zwart group on the microscopy-based probing of the activity of the zebrafish brain. This is augmented by the modelling expertise brought by Prof Dritschel, whose research methods allow the project’s student to characterise how the physical forces in the environment directly affect the embryo.
Informal enquiries regarding this scholarship may be addressed to Maarten Zwart via email to [Email Address Removed]. For more information, please visit the project link.
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