Lateral line
sensory system in fish and amphibians
The lateral line, also called the lateral line organ, is a system of sensory organs found in fish, used to detect movement, vibration, and pressure gradients in the surrounding water. The sensory ability is achieved via modified epithelial cells, known as hair cells, which respond to displacement caused by motion and transduce these signals into electrical impulses via excitatory synapses. Lateral lines play an important role in schooling behavior, predation, and orientation.
Early in the evolution of fish, some of the sensory organs of the lateral line were modified to function as the electroreceptors called ampullae of Lorenzini. The lateral line system is ancient and basal to the vertebrate clade, as it is found in fishes that diverged over 400 million years ago.
Function
The lateral line system allows the detection of movement, vibration, and pressure gradients in the water surrounding an animal. It plays an essential role in orientation, predation, and fish schooling by providing spatial awareness and the ability to navigate in the environment. Analysis has shown that the lateral line system should be an effective passive sensing system able to discriminate between submerged obstacles by their shape. The lateral line allows fish to navigate and hunt in water with poor visibility.
The lateral line system enables predatory fishes to detect vibrations made by their prey, and to orient towards the source to begin predatory action.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lateral line” is sensory system in fish and amphibians. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lateral, line and sensory, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q280969. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lateral line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.