Aquatic

Schooling glassfish can infer danger from the behaviour of nearby fish even when they never see the threat themselves. This exposes a remarkably economical distributed warning mechanism.

Humbug damselfish offer researchers a natural system for studying how threat information propagates through a group without every fish independently detecting the danger.

Collective animals can communicate indirectly through the fluid disturbances their own movements leave behind. This extends stigmergy beyond persistent structures such as ant pheromone trails or termite construction.

What if… we can listen and understand another species. For the first time in history, advances in technology have made it possible to understand the communication of animals.

Three-spined sticklebacks compensate for murky water by becoming more socially coordinated rather than continuing to use the same shoaling rules.

Researchers have developed a way to infer which neighbours an animal is actually responding to directly from collective-movement data. The method tests combinations of interaction distance and viewing angle, then measures how strongly the average heading of candidate neighbours predicts an individual’s subsequent direction.

Fish appear to switch communication channels according to how urgently their school is moving. Experiments with schools of 60 rummy-nose tetras found that fish with an intact lateral-line flow-sensing system responded to accelerating neighbours with about one-third less delay than fish whose lateral line was compromised.

Glassfish appear to coordinate by copying one nearby neighbour at discrete moments rather than averaging the movements of the whole local group.

A theoretical study of collective escape proposes that animals can improve both speed and accuracy by treating an undisturbed neighbour as negative evidence about a possible threat.

This study uses a conditioned escape response to follow how information propagates through schooling fish after selected individuals respond to a threat cue.