We have recently identified a gabaergic network in the anterior hindbrain of larval zebrafish that tracks their heading within the environment. This is truly an allocentric representation: when the fish turns clockwise the representation turns counterclockwise in order to point in the same direction with respect to the environment.
Interestingly, these neurons send all their processes (both ipsilateral dendrites and contralateral axons) into the interpeduncular nucleus (IPN), where they inhibit each other and provide the long-range inhibition to stabilize the ring-attractor network that encodes this heading.
The similarities with the heading direction network of insects were highlighted by Stanley Heinze in this Current Biology Dispatch – thank you. During our project we definitely “stood on the shoulders of insects“. We still do not know where/what the fish are heading towards, but we will follow them and find out.