The hunting strategy of a slender fish from the Amazon is giving researchers more insight into how to balance the metabolic cost of information with the metabolic cost of moving around to get that information.

A new study from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science answers the question: In behaviors in which you have to move to get information, when should the animal spend more energy on locomotion versus spending more energy on getting more information?

The study is published by the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Malcolm MacIver, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of biomedical engineering at McCormick, led a team that analyzed the hunting behavior of the weakly electric black ghost knifefish, native to the Amazon. It hunts at night using a self-generated electric field to sense its surroundings, like a bat uses sonar. This particular animal has become the fruit fly of studies on how animals process sensory information. (The fruit fly has been used extensively to study genetics and developmental biology.) Continue reading →