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Wudu Lado Posted by ewudu on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 (EST) Understanding Chemical Communication in Goldfish My PhD project is designed to characterize the mechanisms of chemical communications in goldfish and how it impacts the animal’s reproductive physiology. Since goldfish are external fertilizers, their reproductive investments in terms of gametes production are energetically costly. Hence, they have to synchronize their reproduction to ensure maximum reproductive success. As such, this species has co-opted the female oocyte maturation hormone, 17α, 20β dihydroxy-4-pregene-3-one, to act as a sex pheromone in the male goldfish. Females use this sex pheromone to communicate and advertise their reproductive status to males thereby synchronizing their reproductive behaviour. This ensures that both males and females aggregate at a specific time and location to spawn without wasting valuable gametes. How sex pheromones signals are coded and processed in the brain of male goldfish remains to be uncovered, but it may have implications for our understanding of chemical communications in humans.