Swim Lab Report

In this experiment, a virtual program designed to demonstrate the swimming of a virtual fish, was used. This program is called SWIMMY. SWIMMY was used in this experiment to determine the circuits that are used in the movement of an animal. This is done by presenting the neurons and the neural circuits in a body which can allow and show the movement of the fish’s tail virtually. The movement of the fish tail occurs by the activation of motor neurons. Moore and Stewart, 2007 These two motor neurons can be used to form a circuit that has the ability to generate movement of the fish’s tail in this experiment, however, the neural circuits that will be examined in this experiment are usually used in fish for movement, digestion and respiration, as well as memory and the ability to perceive objects in certain areas. Marder and Bucher, 2001 Buzsáki, 2005; Gloveli et al., 2005

In this experiment, two different mechanisms were explored, one of a single cell oscillator and the other of two neural circuits, by way of the

These were shown to display spikes of activity of EPSPs. The spikes in cell 2 match up with the sub-threshold activity in cell 1. This was expected. When cell 2 reaches an action potential with its amplitude at 12mV, in figure 4, has a knock on effect of slightly hyperpolarising the following spike in cell 1. This hyperpolarisation is due to the fact that cell 1 and cell 2 are linked and so a depolarisation in cell 2 will lead to a small hyperpolarisation in cell 1. The fish used in SWIMMY moved its tail back and forward with every bunch of spikes that occurred in cell 1, in figure 5.

There were two circuits in this experiment, the first circuit that was observed was circuit (a). This displays an all or none graph. From the first graph that is observed of cell 3, ie figure 6, with the amplitude being 1mV, no action potential fires as not enough stimulation occurs. The depolarisation is