The zebrafish alarm response as embodied semiosis: An approach between enactivism and biosemiotics

Animal behavior is not just mechanical reaction to stimuli but involves active meaning-making. This paper combines two theories—enactivism and biosemiotics—to argue that animals interpret signs in their environment through embodied interaction. The alarm reaction of zebrafish to conspecific alarm substance is analyzed as a semiotic process: the chemical signal is a sign that points to predation risk, and its meaning arises from the fish's sensorimotor engagement with its social and ecological context. This 'embodied semiosis' occurs at individual and collective levels, as shoals collectively interpret danger. The framework offers testable predictions and an alternative to purely representational accounts of adaptive behavior, applicable across species including humans.

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Abstract

Mechanistic approaches in behavioral neuroscience often overlook the situated, embodied, and meaning‑generating dimensions of animal behavior. This paper builds a theoretical bridge between enactivism and biosemiotics – two frameworks that place sense‑making at the core of life – and grounds the synthesis in an empirical case: the alarm reaction of zebrafish (Danio rerio). The conspecific alarm substance (CAS) is not merely a chemical trigger but a semiotic sign that acquires meaning through the fish’s sensorimotor engagement with its ecological and social context. Using Peircean concepts, we analyze how the sign‑vehicle (the CAS mixture), its dynamic object (predation risk), and its interpretants (defensive actions, physiological changes) are enacted across multiple scales: from an individual’s sensorimotor loops to the emergent, collective interpretation of a shoal. This “embodied semiosis” perspective reveals that meaning is not pre‑given but constituted through the animal’s active, value‑laden interaction with its Umwelt. By integrating semiopsychology, which operationalizes semiotic categories for empirical inquiry, with enactivism’s emphasis on embodiment and agency, the framework yields testable predictions about how social coupling, context, and allostatic regulation shape alarm responses. We discuss operational challenges and the risk of overgeneralizing collective interpretants, while arguing that the approach offers a fertile alternative to representationalist accounts of adaptive behavior. Embodied semiosis thus provides a common language for studying how organisms, from zebrafish to humans, enact significance through their living, sense‑making bodies.