DO BOLD FISH FLEE FIRST? THE EFFECT OF PERSONALITY ON THE ESCAPE RESPONSE OF SCHOOLING SHINER PERCH, CYMATOGASTER AGGREGATA

JOHN F STEFFENSEN; DANIEL W MONTGOMERY; PAOLO DOMENICI; LUCAS E BELTRAMINO; JACOB L JOHANSEN; NICHOLAS M BALFOUR

Florence

Congreso; SEB Florence 2018; 2018

The Society for Experimental Biology

Individual personality has been increasingly recognised to elicitvariation in behaviour of fish. Personality along the bold-shyaxis has been demonstrated to influence behavioural responsesof fish during foraging, social interactions and escape response.However, little is known about the influence of fish personalityon schooling behaviour in anti-predator manoeuvres. This studyaimed to quantify the impact of personality along the bold-shy axison the schooling behaviour and escape response of shiner perch,Cymatogaster aggregata, to a threatening mechanical stimulus.Latency of response was significantly affected by distance to thestimulus, with a greater effect in schools consisting exclusively ofshy individuals. As a result, at a distance > 20cm from the stimulus,shy schools had an increased latency in the time it took for the firstfish and the whole school to respond when compared to schoolsof bold individuals. Additionally, the polarity of shy schools wassignificantly lower between 200 and 600 ms post stimulus whencompared to pre-stimulus polarity. This reduction in school polaritypost stimulus was not observed in bold schools. Increased latencyof shy schools, combined with decreased polarity during escaperesponse, suggests decreased escape performance when comparedto bold schools. Bold fish are known to be exposed to a higher risk ofpredation, due to increased risk-taking behaviour compared withshyer conspecifics. Therefore, it is possible that bold fish partlycompensate for increased predation risk by showing increasedescape performance.