New Publication: Auditory representation in Fish Development

Research team from the FishBioacoustics lab, including Raquel Vasconcelos and Clara Amorim from MARE and Daniel Alves and Paulo Fonseca from CE3C, has conducted the first study to demonstrate how the auditory processing of vocalizations develops alongside sound production in a fish species. The study, titled Auditory representation of conspecific calls improves throughout ontogeny in a singing fish, was published in Biology Letters (2025). The article can be accessed here.

The research used the soniferous fish Lusitanian toadfish (Halobatrachus didactylus) as a model to compare juveniles and adults in their ability to detect and represent species-specific territorial and mating calls. By employing auditory-evoked potential recordings, the article highlighted that:

• There are clear developmental improvements in latency, duration, and amplitude-modulation detection of vocalizations across different life stages.

• These findings indicate that fish refine their auditory discrimination of social signals as they mature.

Auditory processing plays a critical role in social communication, as it enables animals to extract, interpret, and respond to complex signal features that convey information about individual quality, motivation, and mate choice. These findings suggest that such mechanism is conserved across vocal vertebrates, thereby enhancing our broader understanding of how communication systems evolve and develop across taxa.

Reference: Vasconcelos, R. O., Alves, D., Amorim, M. C. P., & Fonseca, P. J. (2025). Auditory representation of conspecific calls improves throughout ontogeny in a singing fish. Biology Letters, 21(10), 20250289. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0289