Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-19-2018
Publication Title
Biology Open
Keywords
Schooling behaviour, Fast-start behaviour, Anaerobic capacity, Habitat, Escape response, Plasticity
ISSN
2046-6390
Volume
7
Issue/No.
bio031997
First Page
1
Last Page
7
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.
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
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
NSUWorks Citation
Lauren E. Nadler, Shaun S. Killen, Paolo Domenici, and Mark I. McCormick. 2018. Role of Water Flow Regime in the Swimming Behaviour and Escape Performance of a Schooling Fish .Biology Open , (bio031997) : 1 -7. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/occ_facarticles/1111.
ORCID ID
0000-0001-8225-8344
DOI
10.1242/bio.031997
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.