Behavioral stochastic resonance: How a noisy army betrays its outpost - art. no. 031910

Juvenile paddlefish prey upon single zooplankton by detecting a weak electr ic signature resulting from its feeding and swimming motions. Moreover, it has recently been shown that paddlefish make use of stochastic resonance ne ar the threshold for prey detection: a process termed behavioral stochastic resonance. But this process depends upon an external source of electric no ise. A swarm of plankton, for example, Daphnia, can provide this noise. Ass uming that juvenile paddlefish attack single Daphnia as outliers in the vic inity of the swarm, making use of noise from the swarm, we calculate the sp atial distribution of the average phase locking period for the subthreshold signals acting at the paddlefish rostrum. Numeric evaluation of analytic f ormulas supports the notion of a noise-induced widening of the capture area quantitatively.