UBO

The University of Bonn (UBO) is a major Institution of Higher Education in Germany with more than 30.000 students in many areas of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Medicine and the Humanities. UBO will participate in ANGELS through its Department of Neuroethology and Sensory Ecology which is part of the Zoological Institute, which belongs to the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of UBO-ANSO.

UBO-ANSO works in the area of Sensory Physiology, Neuroscience and Ecology and is studying how animals perceive their environment, how the sense organs and the brain process sensory information, and how animals are adapted to their natural habitats. The major model systems used are weakly electric fishes from Africa and South America. We are employing behavioural, neuroanatomical, electrophysiological, and ecological methods in order to investigate object detection and electrocommunication in different species of electric fishes, and their adaptations to environmental constraints.

In ANGELS, UBO-ANSO will manage a pluridisplinary team of biologists in WP5. UBO-ANSO will perform behavioural experiments with African electric fishes, will do neuroanatomical and electrophysiological experiments, and will measure electric images in African electric fishes. UBO-ANSO’s more than 18 years experience in this field makes this group an ideal partner to study the basis of electrolocation and electrocommunication in electric fishes, to summarize the results in a way useful for the more technically and mathematically oriented partners and to provide relevant information to the whole consortium.

Key personnel for UBO

Prof. Dr. Gerhard von der Emde, head of ANSO, with more than 68 refereed scientific publications on the neurobiology of active sensing systems (bats and electric fish) and one patent on distance measurement with technical electrical sensors. Since 2002, he has a permanent professorship at the University of Bonn, Germany. In addition to investigating the perceptional abilities of electric fish during object detection and their physiological basis, he is designing technical sensor systems for remote sensing of objects, which are built based on the model of electric fishes (Bionics). In 2007/2008, he spent a sabbatical in Montevideo, Uruguay, working on active electrolocation of electric fish together with the partners of IIBCE and UDELAR. He is a member of the editorial board of the several zoological journals and has been organizer of several major electroreception conferences. Dr. von der Emde will be responsible for WP5, coordinating the biological experiments with electric fish.

Dr. Jacob Engelmann is a post-doctoral assistant in the group of Prof. von der Emde, expert in electrophysiology and neuroanatomy, more than 15 publications in major scientific journals on neurobiology of electric fishes. Dr. Engelmann will be involved in the anatomical experiments (task 2), in the measurements of electric images (task 3a), and in the recordings from electroreceptor afferents (task 3b) and central structures (task 3c).

References

• http://www1.uni-bonn.de/startseite/jsp/index.jsp
• http://www.zoologie.uni-bonn.de/NeuroEthologie/index.html

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