GLOM ARTISTS: These finger-length South American catfish are able to sense fast-flowing water and adhere to a nearby surface in response.COURTESY OF DAPHNE SOARESAfter spending all day trapping catfish in a dark cave near a cloud forest in Ecuador, neurophysiologist Daphne Soares and a graduate student emerged late in the evening only to find their exit route from the cave blocked by members of a tribe engaged in a ceremonial gathering. “They were all covered in mud . . . and they were so incredibly surprised” to see a couple of researchers with headlamps and fishing gear, she says. Soares and her student walked past, having collected what they were looking for, and made their way to a makeshift laboratory—“a chicken coop with a generator”—they had set up a few miles away.
Soares had come to this part of South America searching for Astroblepus pholeter, one of a number of Andean catfish that dwell in fast-flowing streams. Daily, the Jumandy Cave floods from heavy rains; water gushes through the cavern and into a recreational swimming area. For years, Soares, a professor at the University of Maryland, had visited the cave to study the ways in which this species had adapted to its dark and turbulent environment. Fish typically employ mechanoreceptors called neuromasts, which make up a sensory stripe along the length of the fish’s body called the lateral line, to detect movement or vibrations in water, but A. pholeter doesn’t have an abundance of neuromasts, Soares says. What they do have, she eventually observed, are little joysticks ...
