Abstract
Sharks and other elasmobranchs hunt by detecting weak electric fields produced by their prey (Kalmijn, 1982). The behavioural threshold for initiating an electrically-guided attack is a few nanovolts (Kalmijn, 1982), but the sensitivity of primary afferent neurons is in the order of a few spikes per second per microvolt (Montgomery, 1984a; Conley and Bodznick, 1994). Thus the change in afferent firing rate caused by prey at the threshold is in the order of 1 spike per minute, or about 0.1% of the spontaneous rate (~15/sec, Montgomery, 1984a).
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Paulin, M., Senn, W., Yarom, Y., Meiri, H., Cohen, D. (1998). A Model of How Rapid Changes in Local Input Resistance of Shark Electrosensory Neurons May Enable Detection of Small Signals. In: Bower, J.M. (eds) Computational Neuroscience. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4831-7_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4831-7_40
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