Juliane Lukas, Jens Krause, Arabella Sophie Träger, Jonas Marc Piotrowski, Pawel Romanczuk, Henning Sprekeler, Lenin Arias-Rodriguez, Stefan Krause, Christopher Schutz, David Bierbach
Author Information
Juliane Lukas: Faculty of Life Sciences, Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, 10115 Berlin, Germany. ORCID
Jens Krause: Faculty of Life Sciences, Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, 10115 Berlin, Germany. ORCID
Arabella Sophie Träger: Faculty of Life Sciences, Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, 10115 Berlin, Germany.
Jonas Marc Piotrowski: Faculty of Life Sciences, Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, 10115 Berlin, Germany.
Pawel Romanczuk: Cluster of Excellence 'Science of Intelligence', Technical University of Berlin, Marchstrasse 23, 10587 Berlin, Germany. ORCID
Henning Sprekeler: Cluster of Excellence 'Science of Intelligence', Technical University of Berlin, Marchstrasse 23, 10587 Berlin, Germany. ORCID
Lenin Arias-Rodriguez: División Académica de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad Juárez Autónoma Tabasco, 86150 Villahermosa, Mexico. ORCID
Stefan Krause: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Lübeck University of Applied Sciences, 23562 Lübeck, Germany. ORCID
Christopher Schutz: Faculty of Life Sciences, Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, 10115 Berlin, Germany.
David Bierbach: Faculty of Life Sciences, Albrecht Daniel Thaer-Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, 10115 Berlin, Germany. ORCID
Collective behaviour is widely accepted to provide a variety of antipredator benefits. Acting collectively requires not only strong coordination among group members, but also the integration of among-individual phenotypic variation. Therefore, groups composed of more than one species offer a unique opportunity to look into the evolution of both mechanistic and functional aspects of collective behaviour. Here, we present data on mixed-species fish shoals that perform collective dives. These repeated dives produce water waves capable of delaying and/or reducing the success of piscivorous bird attacks. The large majority of the fish in these shoals consist of the sulphur molly, , but we regularly also found a second species, the widemouth gambusia, , making these shoals mixed-species aggregations. In a set of laboratory experiments, we found that gambusia were much less inclined to dive after an attack as compared with mollies, which almost always dive, though mollies dived less deep when paired with gambusia that did not dive. By contrast, the behaviour of gambusia was not influenced by the presence of diving mollies. The dampening effect of less responsive gambusia on molly diving behaviour can have strong evolutionary consequences on the overall collective waving behaviour as we expect shoals with a high proportion of unresponsive gambusia to be less effective at producing repeated waves. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Collective behaviour through time'.
