EDITOR’S CHOICE IN CELL & MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
S. McLean et al., “Metabolic costs of feeding predictively alter the spatial distribution of individuals in fish schools,” Curr Biol, 28:1144–49, 2018.
Lots of animals live and move in groups—elephants in herds, wolves in packs, birds in flocks, and fish in schools. “It’s nearly ubiquitous in animals,” says Shaun Killen, an ecophysiologist at the University of Glasgow in the U.K. Research has shown that where an individual is spatially located in the group can affect the benefits it gets from hanging out in a crowd, and behavioral traits, such as boldness, and nutritional states, such as hunger, can influence how individuals jockey for position. But, Killen says, researchers haven’t yet fully explored the role of physiological processes such as digestion in driving animals’ collective behavior.
Killen and his colleagues recently studied schools of Eurasian minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus) swimming in a tank against a ...
