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Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour

Grouping behaviour, as fascinating as it is unclear, has lately drawn the attention of numerous researchers. While most of the authors focused their work on a mechanistic approach to the matter of schooling, this study explores the issue from a population point of view. Present camera observation st...

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Autores principales: Holubová, Michaela, Čech, Martin, Vašek, Mojmír, Peterka, Jiří
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366398/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30740276
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6378
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author Holubová, Michaela
Čech, Martin
Vašek, Mojmír
Peterka, Jiří
author_facet Holubová, Michaela
Čech, Martin
Vašek, Mojmír
Peterka, Jiří
author_sort Holubová, Michaela
collection PubMed
description Grouping behaviour, as fascinating as it is unclear, has lately drawn the attention of numerous researchers. While most of the authors focused their work on a mechanistic approach to the matter of schooling, this study explores the issue from a population point of view. Present camera observation study on the fish community carried out in the epipelagic habitat of a European temperate reservoir in the Czech Republic explored the relationship between density and aggregative features of predominantly cyprinid fish stock. Results demonstrated that schooling behaviour is triggered by the ‘critical density’ of fish in the habitat. School size as well as counts of schools and proportion of schooling individuals increased with the density of fish. Counts of clusters (observed units in time, including singletons, pairs and schools) and cluster size, on the other hand, showed a slowing tendency to increase. The slower increase implies the tendency of fish for not being frequent but rather to create larger groups. Altogether, our findings suggest that fish density is a triggering factor in the formation of large fish schools. As the tendency of cyprinid species for school formation could be an evolutional advantage responsible for dominance in later succession phases of water bodies, we suggest that more in situ studies should be encouraged for the proper understanding of the ecological interactions that drive the structure of aquatic ecosystems and for ensuring unbiased assessment.
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spelling pubmed-63663982019-02-08 Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour Holubová, Michaela Čech, Martin Vašek, Mojmír Peterka, Jiří PeerJ Animal Behavior Grouping behaviour, as fascinating as it is unclear, has lately drawn the attention of numerous researchers. While most of the authors focused their work on a mechanistic approach to the matter of schooling, this study explores the issue from a population point of view. Present camera observation study on the fish community carried out in the epipelagic habitat of a European temperate reservoir in the Czech Republic explored the relationship between density and aggregative features of predominantly cyprinid fish stock. Results demonstrated that schooling behaviour is triggered by the ‘critical density’ of fish in the habitat. School size as well as counts of schools and proportion of schooling individuals increased with the density of fish. Counts of clusters (observed units in time, including singletons, pairs and schools) and cluster size, on the other hand, showed a slowing tendency to increase. The slower increase implies the tendency of fish for not being frequent but rather to create larger groups. Altogether, our findings suggest that fish density is a triggering factor in the formation of large fish schools. As the tendency of cyprinid species for school formation could be an evolutional advantage responsible for dominance in later succession phases of water bodies, we suggest that more in situ studies should be encouraged for the proper understanding of the ecological interactions that drive the structure of aquatic ecosystems and for ensuring unbiased assessment. PeerJ Inc. 2019-02-04 /pmc/articles/PMC6366398/ /pubmed/30740276 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6378 Text en © 2019 Holubová et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
Holubová, Michaela
Čech, Martin
Vašek, Mojmír
Peterka, Jiří
Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
title Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
title_full Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
title_fullStr Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
title_full_unstemmed Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
title_short Density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
title_sort density dependent attributes of fish aggregative behaviour
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366398/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30740276
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6378
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