Cognitive Ecology and Decision Making: Individual Differences in Fish Movements

Fish can use a variety of features and information in their environment to enable them to construct maps, navigate to novel locations, return to home ranges if displaced or complete long distance migrations. While there are clear differences in the strategies and spatial behaviors used by different species, we also find that within species there are differences at the level of the population and even at the individual level. The way fish encode information about their local environment affects the way they behave. We now know that a number of ecological factors (such as predation pressure and stability of the local environment) play a significant role in shaping fish behavior, but this is not the only way fish are affected. Recent work has begun to explore fish temperament traits – behavioral differences between individuals that are consistent over time and context – and these have now been documents to affect several aspects of fish behavior, including the decisions that they make. In this presentation I will consider how the combination of temperament traits and ecologically driven behaviors affects the way fish make decisions and how this influences their movements.