This study is the first to look at the hierarchy of different sensory cues that allow young fish to complete a life-or-death navigational task. Hearing then smell guides fish at the macro scale, but at the fine scale vision takes over as the fish locate their new shoal mates.
Young coral reef fish use sounds, smells and visual cues to find their nursery grounds, according to new research from the University of Bristol, published today in Ecology. Ever had to find your friend in a crowd? Imagine at a festival your mate saying: "I'll be wearing a yellow t-shirt by the hotdog stall behind the jazz stage." Using this information, you could walk around listening out for the romping double bass, and as you get closer and start to hear the trills of the trumpet, begin to sniff out the frying onions and sizzling sausages. Once you have located the hotdog stand, you only need to look for a bright yellow t-shirt and you will find your friend. Young coral reef fish use the same strategy, research from the Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Bristol has found. By testing how young French grunts (a common fish in Curaçao and throughout the Caribbean) responded to local sounds, smells and visual cues, the researchers have unlocked, for the first time, the mystery of how centimetre-long juvenile fish can navigate from the high seas to find their shoal mates in amongst the roots of mangrove trees or blades of seagrass. First the team tested which habitat noises the fish were attracted to using auditory choice chambers. They found that newly-settled fish, just returned to the coast after developing in the plankton for several weeks, were most attracted to recordings of coral reefs.
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