Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

ORCID

0000-0001-8225-8344

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Biology Open

ISSN

2046-6390

Publication Date

9-19-2018

Keywords

Schooling behaviour, Fast-start behaviour, Anaerobic capacity, Habitat, Escape response, Plasticity

Abstract

Animals are exposed to variable and rapidly changing environmental flow conditions, such as wind in terrestrial habitats and currents in aquatic systems. For fishes, previous work suggests that individuals exhibit flow-induced changes in aerobic swimming performance. Yet, no one has examined whether similar plasticity is found in fast-start escape responses, which are modulated by anaerobic swimming performance, sensory stimuli and neural control. In this study, we used fish from wild schools of the tropical damselfish Chromis viridis from shallow reefs surrounding Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The flow regime at each site was measured to ascertain differences in mean water flow speed and its temporal variability. Swimming and escape behaviour in fish schools were video-recorded in a laminar-flow swim tunnel. Though each school's swimming behaviour (i.e. alignment and cohesion) was not associated with local flow conditions, traits linked with fast-start performance (particularly turning rate and the distance travelled with the response) were significantly greater in individuals from high-flow habitats. This stronger performance may occur due to a number of mechanisms, such as an in situ training effect or greater selection pressure for faster performance phenotypes in areas with high flow speed.

DOI

10.1242/bio.031997

Volume

7

Issue

bio031997

First Page

1

Last Page

7

Comments

©2018. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.

Additional Comments

Natural Environment Research Council Advanced Fellowship #: NE/J019100/1; Australian Research Council Discovery grant #: DP170103372; ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies funding #: EI140100117

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Peer Reviewed

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