Matthew J. Hansen
The effect of temporally variable environmental stimuli and group size on emergence behavior
Hansen, Matthew J.; Morrell, Lesley; Ward, Ashley J.W.
Authors
Professor Lesley Morrell L.Morrell@hull.ac.uk
Associate Dean, Education (Faculty of Science and Engineering)
Ashley J.W. Ward
Abstract
How animals trade-off food availability and predation threats is a strong determinant of animal activity and behavior; however, the majority of work on this topic has been on individual animals, despite the modulating effect the presence of conspecifics can have on both foraging and predation risk. Although these environmental factors (food and predation threat) vary spatially within habitats, they also vary temporally, and in marine habitats, this can be determined by not only the diel cycle but also the tidal cycle. Humbug damselfish, Dascyllus aruanus, live in small groups of unrelated individuals within and around branching coral heads, which they collectively withdraw into to escape a predation threat. In this study, we measured the proportion of individuals in the colony that were outside the coral head before and after they were scared by a fright stimulus and compared the responses at high tide (HT) and low tide (LT). We found that a greater proportion of the shoal emerged after the fright stimulus at HT and in larger groups than at LT or in smaller groups. We also quantified the pattern of emergence over time and discovered the rate of emergence was faster in larger shoals as time progressed. We show that shoals of fish change their behavioral response to a predation threat in accordance with the tide, exemplifying how temporally variable environmental factors can shape group movement decisions.
Citation
Hansen, M. J., Morrell, L., & Ward, A. J. (2016). The effect of temporally variable environmental stimuli and group size on emergence behavior. Behavioral ecology, 27(3), 939-945. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arv237
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Dec 12, 2015 |
Online Publication Date | Jan 22, 2016 |
Publication Date | 2016 |
Deposit Date | Jan 25, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | Nov 23, 2017 |
Journal | Behavioral ecology |
Print ISSN | 1045-2249 |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 27 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 939-945 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arv237 |
Keywords | Dascyllus aruanus |
Public URL | https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/384505 |
Publisher URL | http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/01/20/beheco.arv237.abstract |
Additional Information | Authors' accepted manuscript of article published in: Behavioral ecology, 2016, v.27, issue 3. |
Contract Date | Nov 23, 2017 |
Files
Article.pdf
(939 Kb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
©2017 University of Hull
You might also like
Building a competence-based model for the academic development of programme leaders
(2023)
Journal Article
Computerized stimuli for studying oddity effects
(2019)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Hull
Administrator e-mail: repository@hull.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search