[/caption]Editor - Scientists have found crawfish are not only good for eating but finding out how people make decisions, so this might be a good piece of information for folks in Louisiana, to preserve some of those creatures for research not just for food.
A University of Maryland study is using crawfish to learn about human brain activity at the cellular level, as clues to how human beings make decisions and adjust their lifestyle needs. Scientists have concluded there is a real cost-benefit side to doing this and that crawfish are an excellent and practical model for examining the neural circuitry and neurochemistry of decision-making At the present time there is no way to do this type of direct research with the human brain. The study will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and has just been released to the press.
“Matching individual neurons to the decision making processes in the human brain is simply impractical for now,” explains University of Maryland psychologist Jens Herberholz, the study’s senior author. “History has shown that findings made in the invertebrate nervous systems often translate to more complex organisms. It’s unlikely to be exactly the same, but it can inform our understanding of the human brain, nonetheless. The basic organization of neurons and the underlying neurochemistry are similar, involving serotonin and dopamine, for example.”
Herberholz goes on to say this work will add to the information found from rodents and primates. “Combining the findings from different animal models is the only practical approach to work out the complexities of human decision making at the cellular level.” The experiments included presenting crawfish with decisions between finding food for themselves or becoming a meal for a predator. Scientists used junior Louisiana crawfish for their experiments.
Crawfish had to decide which way to move when they were placed in a situation where they could make choices freely and offered a simultaneous threat and reward. The scent of food was placed in the apparent approach of a predator, in some cases only a shadow. The animals had to decide whether to risk being eaten to get the food and how what they would do to adjust.
Crawfish would give specific signals like flipping their tails and swimming backwards, and in doing so created a measurable electric neural impulse that scientists could record. That tail-flipping is an escape strategy against predators, but it also adds distance between a hungry animal and the meal it wants. Researchers looked at this tail-flipping phenomenon to see how crawfish would respond and found when the predator appeared to be moving too fast, the crawfish wouldn't approach. The crawfish made decisions based upon its observations and responded with signals that could be measured. Researchers found they could do this very fast.
“Our results indicate that when the respective values of tail-flipping and freezing change, the crayfish adjust their choices accordingly, thus preserving adaptive action selection,” the study concludes. “We have now shown that crayfish, similar to organisms of higher complexity, integrate different sensory stimuli that are present in their environment, and they select a behavioural output according to the current values for each choice.”
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