To navigate the world, we all shimmy like these electric fish

For the first time, scientists demonstrate that a wide range of organisms, even microbes, perform the same pattern of movements in order to sense the world. While watching electric knifefish in an observation tank, the researchers noticed how when it was dark, the fish shimmied back and forth significantly more frequently. Creatures that shared the behavior with the fish included amoeba, moths, cockroaches, moles, bats, mice, and humans. "Not a single study that we found in the literature violated the rules we discovered in the electric fish, not even single-celled organisms like amoeba sensing an electric field," Cowan said. Scientists are just beginning to understand how animals control sensing movements unconsciously.