The Effects of Size Variation on Schooling Cohesiveness Daniel Geldof, Rory Caskey, Jackie Fox

Abstract

Fish schooling is a common behavior in fishes that has been around for at least 50 million years. This collective movement increases swimming efficiency, foraging success, and predator detection. Schooling is determined by both instinct and learned behavior, this leads them to school with biomechanically similar fish. Understanding how fish school with morphologically dissimilar fish. Larger fish school better with smaller fish while all fish school better with fish they are socially familiar with. Disturbances that may pull schools apart are increasing over time with global climate change and increase in natural hazards, like hurricanes. This leads to a necessary understanding of fish school reaggregation behavior. This was done by testing schools of fish of similar morphologies and fish of different morphologies to see how schooling behavior varies between them. It was shown that there is no significant difference in nearest neighbor distance based on morphologies which indicates that fish are able to school with fish of dissimilar sizes. In the future other variables will need to be considered for a better picture of the behavior of these schools.