Heritable differences in schooling behavior among threespine stickleback populations revealed by a novel assay.

ABSTRACT: Identifying the proximate and ultimate mechanisms of social behavior remains a major goal of behavioral biology. In particular, the complex social interactions mediating schooling behavior have long fascinated biologists, leading to theoretical and empirical investigations that have focused on schooling as a group-level phenomenon. However, methods to examine the behavior of individual fish within a school are needed in order to investigate the mechanisms that underlie both the performance and the evolution of schooling behavior. We have developed a technique to quantify the schooling behavior of an individual in standardized but easily manipulated social circumstances. Using our model school assay, we show that threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) from alternative habitats dif

SUBMITTER: Wark AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3064674 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature