2.16 Control of fish body and fin motion
is complex but still poorly understood
Fish possess remarkable muscular control over body
and fin movements, and yet we are just at the beginning
of understanding how the nervous system of fish controls motion, what the sensory inputs are that provide
fish with positional information on their body and fins,
and how fish sense and interpret their hydrodynamic
environment. For example, there are no data on the
sensory information available to fishes from the surface
of fins. Can fish sense the position of their fins and the
extent of deformation during locomotion? We have no
idea at present, although we suspect that such information is not only available to the fish central nervous
system, but that fishes use this information to modulate locomotor performance.