We turn to animals—bears and bulls—to describe the stock market, but researchers at NYU found that the best way to describe the motion of zebrafish was to borrow some knowledge from the stock market.
As Motherboard’s Derek Mead described, the zebrafish has become “biology’s supermodel” species. They’ve become a go-to in neuroscience and other fields, because they’re genetically similar to people, they breed quickly and we’ve already studied their genome pretty extensively. Zebrafish have the privilege/burden of serving science, which sometimes repays the fish by getting them good and drunk.
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Even so, designing experiments for the fish is time-consuming and often messy. The data collected from zebrafish experiments can yield mixed data. In order to design better experiments, or maybe excuse fish from being subjected to experiments at all, the director of NYU’s Dynamical Systems Laboratory, Maurizio Porfiri, and his team wanted to create a computer model of how the fish swim.
“The idea is that you may be able to run pilot studies with virtual computer models and use them to design the experiments that are ultimately needed,” Porfiri, the study’s lead author, told me. “In the long run, we [intend] to add social interactions as well and model the effect of psychoactive compounds, so that before doing some serious experiments with a group of fish you can do simulations and decide how many tests to do or if the experiment is needed at all. Also, simulation results can help refine the experiments and getting the most useful data you can from a trial.”
The researchers found that the zebrafish has a pretty characteristic stroke—coasting for a bit before a quick turn. You can see a little bit of it demonstrated in this high-quality aquarium footage below, although Porfiri and his team aren’t working with zebrafish in social environments just yet.
The small variations and fast turns came to resemble something else to researchers that was pretty far afield from zoology: the stock market. They used “a stochastic mean reverting jump diffusion model,” which models small movements interspersed with bigger jumps to describe how zebrafish move.
It’s not exactly William Blake seeing “a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” It’s about as poetic as financial modeling formulae get, I imagine—to see the motion of the market in a zebrafish flourish.
