This action is to support the travel costs of eight U.S. scientists who will be participating in the 1989 meeting of the International Society for Neuroethology to be held in West Berlin. This group of scientists will be delivering scientific papers on the neural and behavioral principles of the distinctive escape response that involves the Mauthner neurons of fish and amphibians. The Mauthner system is conserved among all the vertebrates and plays a fundamental role in the control of movements such as locomotion and orientation of the body. It is a very simple system which is analogous to the reticulospinal system found in mammals, including man. The symposium to be held will consolidate our knowledge of the Mauthner system as a model for reticulospinal function as found in man.
