Schooling in fish

Author: Aparna Bhaduri

Introduction

Humans have been interested in schooling behavior in fish for centuries, often for very practical reasons. Before scientists marveled at schools as perfect examples of aggregation and products of fine tuned evolutionary action, schooling was important to fisherman. Understanding how and when these schools would arise, how they would travel, and where they could be found were important in many coastal cities and civilizations. Aristotle himself once commented that the fish school ought to be what a society strives to be: as such, the human interest in schooling fish is one of the oldest forms of animal behavior study, one that has taken on an increasingly scientific perspective.

As evolutionary theory predicts, each individual within the school competes for resources, survival, and reproductive potential (Hamilton 1970). A school is a group of fish ranging from just a few fish to thousands of fish that acts like a single entity, where the behaviors that it engages in such as swimming, avoiding predation , and foraging benefits each member of the group distinctly (Edelstein-Keshet 1999). Therefore, questions about schooling behavior center on the evolutionary reasons for schools, potential costs and how they are overcome, as well as specific examinations of the school dynamic .

The methods of studying fish are quite diverse: observation , experimentation , comparison , and computer modeling are some of the most common ways fish schools are studied. The schooling fish that are studied range from the easily manipulated Trinidadian guppy, to the common herring, to parrotfish that are found near corals ( [link] ). Hundreds of species of fish school, and many of them have been studied.