Meeting Abstract
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 need to use multiple sensory modalities to form and maintain their groupings. To investigate the role of the different senses involved in schooling behavior, we developed a simple robotic apparatus that could “swim” alongside groups of schooling giant danios Devario aequipinnatus. The system included an elastomer fish model, mounted on a rod, that oscillated its tail back and forth as it moved in a circular track. At certain swimming speeds and tail oscillation frequencies, the danios match speed with the model fish. Because of this, we can test how well the fish can match speed with the robot by perturbing the robot’s velocity and quantifying how well the fish track the robot. We can also quantify the importance of different sensory modalities by testing schooling in the dark (so that vision is reduced), or with turbulence in the tank (so that the lateral line sense is reduced). This study will help us to explore how fish use different sensory systems to school in different environmental conditions and how they adapt to changes in the school.
