Behavioral stochastic resonance: How a noisy army betrays its outpost

Abstract

Juvenile paddlefish prey upon single zooplankton by detecting a weak electric signature resulting from its feeding and swimming motions. Moreover, it has recently been shown that paddlefish make use of stochastic resonance near the threshold for prey detection: a process termed behavioral stochastic resonance. But this process depends upon an external source of electric noise. A swarm of plankton, for example, Daphnia, can provide this noise. Assuming that juvenile paddlefish attack single Daphnia as outliers in the vicinity of the swarm, making use of noise from the swarm, we calculate the spatial distribution of the average phase locking period for the subthreshold signals acting at the paddlefish rostrum. Numeric evaluation of analytic formulas supports the notion of a noise-induced widening of the capture area quantitatively.