ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the activational effects of sex steroid hormones on the electrical activity of central and peripheral circuits that generate and sense a sexually dimorphic communication signal in weakly electric fish. Weakly electric fish produce electric fields from an electric organ and sense electric fields with specialized sensory receptor cells. They sense the distortions of their own Electric Organ Discharges (EODs) imposed by nearby objects to locate and identify those objects, a process termed electrolocation. The chapter focuses on the species Sternopygus macrurus which produces a sinusoidal EOD. The fish's own electric fields and those of other fish are sensed by a specific class of sensory receptors called tuberous receptors. Tuberous electroreceptors are located in capsules in the epidermis all over the body surface, most densely over the head and anterior end of the fish. Understanding how sex steroids modify the electrical activity of cells is a major challenge in the field of behavioral neuroendocrinology.
