Conversation with a Colleague: Joseph A. Sisneros: The Soniferous Life of Midshipman Fish

We midshipman a acoustic social Thus, it has become a good model species to investigate the neural basis of acoustic communication. Female midshipman rely on their auditory sense to detect and locate calling males during the breeding season. Work from our lab has shown that females exhibit reproductive-state and hormone-dependent changes in the auditory sensitivity of the saccule, the main organ of hearing in the midshipman and most other fishes, such that reproductive females are better able to hear the advertisement calls of potential mates than nonreproductive females. The primary mechanism for this reproductive state-dependent change in hearing sensitivity is estrogen. In support of these findings, studies of human and rodent females with Turner’s syndrome, a genetic aberration that results in the loss of ovarian estrogen production and decreased estrogen-receptor expression in the cochlea, show that females with this syndrome exhibit a progressive loss in high-frequency hearing with development. These mammalian studies support the link between estrogen and high-frequency hearing sensitivity. Might circulating levels of estrogen