“But we're also removing the social influence that those fish had on the other fish in their social network,” Gil says. When people remove fish, they’re removing an invaluable controller of the algae that can get out of hand, blanketing corals and killing them. In their simulations, the researchers found that it’s not just the magnitude of a threat like overfishing that damages a reef ecosystem, but the rate. ![]() The results are at once troubling and promising. These ecosystem models are incredibly valuable, because they allow us to understand how these gigantic, complex ecosystems grow and change over really long timescales, from decades to centuries, even millennia.” “You can impose different human-driven pressures on it, and you can see how it responds. “You can play with that ecosystem like you would a game,” Gil says. ![]() Using the data they’ve gathered from the reef, Gil and his colleagues have created mathematical simulations-highly accurate video games, really-to show how these seemingly inconsequential interactions in fact have serious consequences for the health of the reef over long timescales. “So in other words, if there's a bunch of fish between them and the scary thing, they're way less likely to flee from the scary thing,” Gil says. And their experiments show that if a fish is seeing the looming stimulus on the iPad but also seeing other fish with the same eyeball, it’s less likely to freak out. They’ve found that fish are more likely to stick around an area filling their bellies with algae if others are also around. The informal social network that these fish form is, like Facebook, a powerful surveillance protocol, which the researchers have now precisely characterized. They're actually looking for patches that they can eat from, and not get eaten by, say, sharks.” So it sort of seems similar to these fish, except for them the stakes are a bit higher. “Or maybe there's even a food-poisoning risk. “On the flip side, if you see a fairly empty restaurant, you might conclude-especially at dinnertime-’Oh maybe the food's not that good,’” Gil says. You and I do the same when we’re walking a street looking for a place to eat-you’re going to choose a crowded restaurant because the people within are telegraphing information about its desirability, however unintentionally. By frequenting a particular area of a reef, they’re unintentionally telegraphing important information for other fish, even of different species: Here is food, and here I am safe from predators, and so you will be, too. “Technology is now allowing us to bring that sort of renaissance of big data into nature.”Įven if they aren’t a part of a school, fish turn out to be habitual followers. “We've seen through Facebook, through Twitter, that you can glean incredible volumes of data to reach really powerful insights about human behavior,” says lead author Michael Gil, of the University of Colorado Boulder, UC Santa Cruz, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ![]() Break up this social network by overfishing, and the consequences ripple across the whole ecosystem, the researchers argue in a new paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If too much algae grows, it keeps light from reaching the corals, preventing them from harvesting the sun’s energy. These social networks make it safer for fish to gobble up the algae that would otherwise choke coral reefs if they weren’t around to keep it in check. By arranging underwater cameras on a plastic scaffolding above reefs, and using algorithms inspired by video games to determine where the fish are looking, the researchers modeled how individual fish monitor each other’s movements to determine whether an area is safe or dangerous. As many a marine biologist has noted, fish aren’t in it to make friends-they’re in it to survive and reproduce.īut scientists are uncovering a fascinating exception in coral reefs, not unlike the one Nemo called home: Here fish of various species band together, developing social networks exactly to survive and reproduce. Among the many egregious scientific inaccuracies of Finding Nemo-fish can talk, sharks form support groups, turtles wax their shells-perhaps none is more glaring than the conceit of fish maintaining friendships.
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