Subterranean Fishes of the World

6052

2023

249-262

Wang, W., Rohner, N. and Wang, Y

Springer

Emerging model organisms

Collective behavior is a hallmark of complex animal systems and can be observed from simpler invertebrates to humans. In fish, shoaling or schooling tendencies are typically measured by inter-individual or nearest neighbor distance. However, for fish species that rarely express social-like interactions, these measurements are usually insufficient for the detection of these rare social events. Addressing changes in these rare social events is crucial to understanding the physiology of these fish and ecological influences on their behaviors. Recently, we developed a more sensitive method to detect a significant amount of social-like nearby interactions in the asocial and blind Mexican cave fish. Here, we provide a detailed procedure for the nearby interaction assay, from the rearing of the experimental fish to the data analyses.

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