We all shimmy like these electric fish

An electric knife fish shown with a black background To navigate the world, we all shimmy like these electric fish Johns Hopkins scientists are the first to demonstrate that a wide range of organisms, even microbes, perform the same pattern of movements in order to sense their surroundings. An electric knifefish shimmies in the water for the same reason a dog sniffs or a human glances around a new place-to make sense of their surroundings. For the first time, scientists demonstrate that a wide range of organisms, even microbes, perform the same pattern of movements in order to sense the world. The research, which has implications for cognition and robotics, was published today in Nature Machine Intelligence . "Amoeba don't even have a nervous system, and yet they adopt behavior that has a lot in common with a human's postural balance or fish hiding in a tube," said study author Noah Cowan , a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. "These organisms are quite far apart from each other in the tree of life, suggesting that evolution converged on the same solution through very different underlying mechanisms." The findings stem from the team's efforts to figure out what the nervous system does when animals move to improve their perception of the world, and whether that behavior could be translated to robotic control systems. While watching electric knifefish in an observation tank, the researchers noticed how when it was dark, the fish shimmied back and forth significantly more frequently.