Fish Schooling

Fish and other organisms move together in coordinated groups to defend against predators, give them allies to help gather food, and lessen the metabolic costs of transportation. Whether they are in a herd, flock, or school, animals form and maintain their groupings using multiple sensory modalities. In the lab, animal groups are often studied in well-lit, open environments, when their senses receive good information. But in the natural environment, sensing is often limited. For example, fish school in darkness, flow, or with damaged lateral lines, conditions that limit the information they can gain from their senses.

My research investigates how the school structure of giant danios (Devario aequipinnatus) changes in conditions that limit sensory information. The goal of this work is to understand how fish adjust their schooling behavior in order to adapt to information-poor situations. I place giant danios in flow, darkness, or ablate their lateral lines. This allows me to see how these conditions effect the syntonization, polarization, and density of the schools.

I use DeepLabCut to track the fish, allowing me to quickly and easily get the midlines of the fish from the high speed videos taken while they are in the flow tank.