Courtship complexity: insights from Neotropical birds
- Datum: 14.10.2024
- Uhrzeit: 11:00 - 12:00
- Vortragende: Lilian Tonelli Manica
- Federal University of Paraná, Brazil
- Ort: MPI BI Seewiesen
- Raum: Seminar Room House 4
- Gastgeber: Maude Baldwin
- Kontakt: maude.baldwin@bi.mpg.de

Courtship displays, driven by sexual selection, are fascinating behaviors across a wide range of animal taxa. Birds, in particular, serve as excellent study models due to their often multimodal sexual exhibitions, which involve various sensory modalities such as coloration, body movements, and vocalizations. In this lecture, I will share insights from my research on Neotropical bird species. My work has focused on the mechanisms behind the production of these multimodal displays and their impact on female choice. I will explore key aspects such as intra- and interindividual variability in display performance, vigor, and skill, which have been central to my projects. I will specially discuss my studies on the Swallow-tailed Manakin, native to the Atlantic Forest and particularly notable for its cooperative cartwheel-like dance involving multiple males. I look forward to sharing these findings and discussing their implications for the study of animal behavior and evolutionary biology.
Working memory—the
ability to keep information in mind for short periods of time—is a central
building block of cognition, thought to be produced by cortical circuits and
exclusive to mammals. Our work challenges this idea. We discovered that
larval zebrafish, an animal with no cortex, keep directional information in
memory to decide where to escape. Surprisingly, larvae share with mammals many
of the key features of working memory. Similar to primates, they store memories
up to 10s. Also, larvae reset the memory after escaping, showing that
information is selected to be used for specific decisions. Finally, fish
average information from distinct cues, suggesting that they can manipulate
working memories.
But, how is working memory stored in the larval brain?
To answer this question, we built a light-sheet microscope to perform brain-wide calcium imaging in larvae performing the working memory assay and mapped brain areas whose activity correlates with different features of the assay. In particular, we found neurons in the hindbrain oscillator that show persistent activity during the delay period, with a timescale matching that of working memory, and whose activity is reset after decision. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of zebrafish larvae as a model for the study of the subcortical brain regions involved in working memory.