Communication and Waveform Analysis in Weakly Electric Fishes With Special Emphasis on Mormyrids

Abstract

This article was originally published in The Senses: A Comprehensive Reference, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator.

Mitogenome recovered from a 19th Century holotype by shotgun sequencing supplies a generic name for an orphaned clade of African weakly electric fishes (Osteoglossomorpha, Mormyridae)

“…Based on results of previous phylogenetic studies of Mormyroidea (Sullivan et al 2000;Peterson et al 2022) the tree was rooted with Myomyrus macrops. To this alignment we added the Cyt-b sequences from NMW 22417, the P. tavernei and Inkisi River specimens, plus previously published Cyt-b sequences of HaSC species and populations from Kramer et al (2004), Kramer andSwartz (2010), andMutizwa et al (2021) as well as new sequences from H. szaboi-like forms from the Kabompo River, a large left-bank affluent of the upper Zambezi in Zambia. As analyzed, this dataset included sequences from 113 individuals.…”

“…Mormyrid fishes are well known for their unusual morphologies, large brains, and ability to generate and sense weak electric pulses for object location and communication (Hopkins 1986;Carlson et al 2019;Kramer 2021). With more than 230 species placed in 21 genera, Mormyridae is by far the largest family of extant Osteoglossomorpha, among the most speciose families of freshwater fishes endemic to Africa (Froese and Pauly 2022;Sullivan and Lavoué 2022), and along with the otophysan gymnotiforms of the Neotropics one of two great continental radiations of weakly electric teleosts (Moller 1995;Lavoué et al 2012;Crampton 2019;Ford and Albert 2022).…”