A New Robot for the Bestiary: How to Build a Robotic Ghost Fish

At night in the rivers of the Amazon Basin there buzzes an entire electric civilization of fish that "see" and communicate by discharging weak electric fields. These odd characters, swimming batteries which go by the name of "weakly electric fish," have been the focus of research in my lab and those of many others for quite a while now, because they are a model system for understanding how the brain works. (While their brains are a bit different, we can learn a great deal about ours from them, just as we've learned much of what we know about genetics from fruit flies.) There are now well over 3,000 scientific papers on how the brains of these fish work.