Acronym NA
Category
Aquaculture
Title Coping with divided attention: effects of the social and physical environment on the performance of fishes Programme National Programme
Instrument (FP6)
Contact Type (FP7)
Strand (Interreg)
NA
Theme (FP7)
Activity Area (FP6)
Regional Area (Interreg)
Action (COST)
NA
Specific Programme (FP7)
NA
Funding source National Coordinator Jörgen Johnsson Coordinator email Jorgen.Johnsson@bioenv.gu.se
Coordinator institution
UGOT - University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
Institutions involved
NA
Start year 2005 End year 2010 Funding (€) € NA Website NA Summary This project investigates how the social and physical environment influences behavioural performance in a complex environment. Animals process information about several tasks simultaneously. However, limited attention abilities constrain behaviour so that only a limited amount of information can be processed at once, which can have profound fitness influences. We recently showed that fish in familiar groups are less aggressive, consume more food, and respond faster to a predator attack than unfamiliar individuals. These results suggest that familiarity increases the ability of animals to cope with divided attention, by allowing attention to be switched from aggression to other tasks. These ideas are developed further in a series of experimental studies on young brown trout and salmon. Part 1: we investigate how familiarity influences the ability to find prey and detect predators, predicting that the advantage of familiarity will increase with the complexity of the foraging task. Part 2: since aggressive individuals focus more attention towards agonistic interactions, we predict that they are less successful in finding prey and detecting predators than less aggressive individuals. Part 3: As environmental complexity stimulate neural growth in mammals, we predict that fish reared in simple habitats will show reduced brain development, lower capacity to perform complex foraging tasks, and lower fitness in the wild compared with fish reared in complex habitats.
Keywords
Fish biology;
Animal welfare;
Fish;
Marine Region
16
East of Gotland or Gulf of Riga (27.IIId.28)
17
Bothnian Sea (27.IIId.30)
27
Bothnian Bay (27.IIId.31)
23
Baltic West of Bornholm (27.IIId.24)
21
Southern Central Baltic-East (27.IIId.26)
20
Archipelago Sea (27.IIId. 29)
24
Sound, Belt Sea or Transition Area (27.IIIb,c)
14
Skagerrak, Kattegat (27.IIIa)
19
Gulf of Finland (27.IIId.32)
22
Southern Central Baltic-West (27.IIId.25)
18
West of Gotland (27.IIId.27)
11
Marine Region Map
