Heed Your Friends' Fishy Tales
By Helen Potter
Do you trust your friends? More to the point, do you trust your friends to stop you from being eaten whilst looking for food in a Swedish maze? That’s the question that been haunting a group of sticklebacks recently.
Ecologists Jörgen Johnsson and Fredrik Sundström of Göteborg University, Sweden, trained minnows to find food correctly in a maze, either in the presence of a predator or when no danger was to be seen. They then added a naïve minnow to the group and observed how successful it was in completing the maze either with or without the predator.
The new fish was twice as likely to succeed in finding food if its group had been trained for the scenario it found itself in, but the ecologists found that, regardless of training, as the experience of the groupmates increased, so did the foraging ability of the naïve fish.
This has suggested that, individually, animals cannot keep up with rapid changes in their environment, and so rely on social information (even if it is inaccurate) may be beneficial in the long term.
So, no matter how much bad advice your particular group of chums spouts, in the long run it will (apparently) do you good.
More of Helen's articles are here. Read them NOW!
Ecologists Jörgen Johnsson and Fredrik Sundström of Göteborg University, Sweden, trained minnows to find food correctly in a maze, either in the presence of a predator or when no danger was to be seen. They then added a naïve minnow to the group and observed how successful it was in completing the maze either with or without the predator.
The new fish was twice as likely to succeed in finding food if its group had been trained for the scenario it found itself in, but the ecologists found that, regardless of training, as the experience of the groupmates increased, so did the foraging ability of the naïve fish.
This has suggested that, individually, animals cannot keep up with rapid changes in their environment, and so rely on social information (even if it is inaccurate) may be beneficial in the long term.
So, no matter how much bad advice your particular group of chums spouts, in the long run it will (apparently) do you good.
More of Helen's articles are here. Read them NOW!
Image: Walter Groesel
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