Bigger fish to force schooling

[pablo]

Shock horror: Pro aquascapers scare their fish to force schooling before a photo. Cruelty to animals or necessary evil to win an aquascaping competition?

I think fish in nature may exibit this schooling behaviour several times daily, when bigger fish move by. In our tanks (predominantly well planted and healthy here on UKAPS) schooling fish are overly calm due to the lack of predators, abundance of cover and steady flow of food. They often want for nothing and we may overprotect them a little.......... because we love them of course!

I think having bigger fish triggering schooling behaviour would be very natural, but it's likely that the schooling fish will just get used to the bigger fish and mostly stop schooling after a while.If they were being predated upon though this would be a different story.

 

[scootamum]

This statement in particular is where i fall off my chair and is completely out of my grasp.. Even if it has millions of years evolution, fast or slow then still it must be a rather very intelligent process making that decision to grow in a deceptive form or color the fool a predator.. The most striking animals on this planet when it comes to that are among other the Phyllium Giganteum.. Behavior ok this i can grasp, but looks not so very much.

In the end for me i rather believe it's just a nice theory to give some more intrigue to the story, since no human ever witnesed any form of evolution like this, we are much to short on this planet for that. If it is not just chance and incidentaly fooling predators there must be something in animals and maybe even plants going on of which we are very reluctand to give credit to for what ever reason.

Nominalism??

We are smashing flies for hundreds of thousends of years and still they didn't grow a helmet..

Not fish I know, but this article on Wikipedia about the Peppered Moth may help you get your head around it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,

Peppered Moth may help you get your head around it

I've had a small involvement with the on-going research at Liverpool University on <"industrial melanism in Peppered Moth (Biston betularia)">.

If people want a more accessible read then Jerry Coyne's pages are (generally) really good. <"Why Evolution is True: the peppered moth">. You might also like his <"books">.

Michael Majerus was working on <"Peppered Moths"> before his untimely death.

Neil Shubin's <"Your Inner Fish...."> is also a good read, but slightly more technical.

cheers Darrel

 

[zozo]

Not fish I know, but this article on Wikipedia about the Peppered Moth may help you get your head around it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

I can get my head around color changes for camouflage, in colors like black. green, pepepred or any other random variety of colors and many animals do. I have a few fish in my tank (Hara Jerdoni) doing that, also peppered in a variety of colors. Since there is visuel input then if the animal tries to blend in to that. Still a very remarkable sophisticated property for such eledged rather stupid small brained animals doing that instinctively . But when it comes to what regular scientists also state about intelligence and brain size etc, then it's rather contraditive to state that animals take very complex color paterns as defensive strategy, like stripes, or even more complex a patern in a shape of an eye. Even some kinds of plants are decorated with such defensive properties in the way they grow or look.

Tho already proven that trees take defensive measures with the help of communicating to eachother over vast distances. So if plantlive already communicates without having detectable brain tissue.. So who the hell are we to give measures to intelligence and brainsize and question animal abilities for having emotions.

I guess ingnorance rather is an average human instinctive defensive strategy. And not a particulary smart one too.

Another nice example is, with natural catastrophes like that last tsunami where reportedly very little wildlife got killed. Remarkable isn't it, something that only occurs once in a few centuries and still all wildlife detects it and goes to higher grounds before it hits.. They probably hear or feel something they associate with danger and flee..