What brain regions are responsible for conspecific mate recognition?

Abstract

Astatotilapia burtoni is a species of cichlid fish from East Africa. Cichlids are remarkable for having evolved into thousands of species all in the same area and yet continuously mate with their own species. Fertile females release prostaglandin F2𝛼 (PGF2𝛼) related pheromones that males need to detect in order to successfully mate (Li et al., 2024). Pheromones are important for cichlid behavior, but it is not known what brain regions in the male brain respond to female pheromones. I hypothesize that male brains will have different levels of preoptic area activation dependent on odor species. The activity marker from this experiment is strongly expressed in the POA. The males exposed to PGF2a A. Burtoni females appear to have more activation than that of the vehicle, and other species. The next step in this project is to quantify the cell number and fluorescence intensity of the POA and other regions of interest. This experiment lays the groundwork to recreate a larger trial with a bigger sample size that can determine if A. burtoni are able to detect species through pheromone signaling. This would be of large significance given the unknown mechanism through which cichlids in lake Tanganyika do conspecific mating while surrounded by thousands of fish of very similar species.