麻豆影院

Published research co-authored by CU 麻豆影院 marine biologist shows that coral reef fish can make dynamic adjustments in their sensitivity to information from other fish to suppress the spread of misinformation

If you want to understand how wild animals deal with socially transmitted misinformation, examining the habits coral reef fish is a pretty good place to start.

In a nutshell, that鈥檚 the assessment of a research paper recently published in听The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the听听(NAS), an authoritative source of original research that broadly spans the biological, physical and social sciences.听

The paper, titled听, was co-authored by Mike Gil, 麻豆影院 marine biologist and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.听

鈥淚t turns out that Disney鈥檚 鈥楩inding Nemo鈥� might have been closer to reality than you probably thought,鈥澨鼼il says. 鈥淔ish in coral reefs are, indeed, social beings.鈥�

He explains that information from neighboring fish can be very useful, because it can help an individual fish find resources like food or shelter鈥攐r it can provide them with an early warning for shared dangers, such as an approaching shark.

鈥淏ut these reef fish鈥攍ike humans鈥攃an also behave in ways that can mislead others,鈥� he says. 鈥淔or example, when they are out and about, feeding from the reef, fish commonly mistake benign environmental cues for danger, and will spontaneously flee鈥攁s if they鈥檙e being hunted by a predator.

鈥淪uch dramatic escape behavior is energetically costly to the individual,鈥� Gil says, noting that in those instances the fish鈥攄escribed by researchers as a 鈥渇irst responder鈥濃�攅xecutes an escape maneuver involving a deep body bend followed by large acceleration and rapid turning.听

That motion, in turn, sends sensory information to surrounding individuals, 鈥渢elling them that danger could be near, and they, too, may want to stop feeding and swim for their lives,鈥� he adds.听

Given that any fish is capable of such spontaneous flight behavior, Gil says researchers鈥� initial hypothesis was that the larger the group of fish, the greater the chance that any one fish would trigger a false alarm that could startle the whole group.

鈥淎nd so our expectation would be that larger groups of fish will be increasingly likely to fall victim to energetically costly misinformation cascades that disrupt their feeding behavior. But, to our surprise, we do not see this,鈥� he says.

While some escape events involve large response cascades, most involve only one or a few responders, according to Gil.听

鈥淲hat we found was that when these fish were surrounded by more neighboring fish, they dialed down their responsiveness to information from any given neighbor,鈥� he says. 鈥淓ach individual fish鈥檚 willingness to essentially ignore information from one or a few individuals听behaving in an extreme way largely prevented the entire group from being misled by misinformation. Instead, these听groups of fish are able to carry on eating, largely undisturbed by frequent exposure to misinformation.鈥�

Gil says the researchers reached their conclusions by placing several video cameras on a coral reef to continuously observe fish behavior and then using artificial intelligence to help analyze the videos.听

In their paper, the researchers showed that in natural foraging collectives escape events in the absence of true predatory threats occur frequently, at a mean rate of one event per 7.7 minutes. Gil says that, if coral reef fish acted on all of the false warnings they are given, the effect would be devastating to both the fish and coral reefs.听

鈥淧erhaps what is most remarkable about our findings is that if reef fish behaved in more conventional ways鈥攊ncluding in ways that resemble human behavior鈥攍arge groups of fish would be distracted so frequently by misinformation cascades that they could become dysfunctional鈥攎eaning their ecological role would not be fulfilled,鈥� he says.听

鈥淔or the fish species we鈥檙e studying, that would mean algae that these fish 鈥榗lean鈥� (meaning eat) from the sea floor could accumulate and kill corals that form the basis for the ecosystem. Fortunately for听the many creatures that depend on coral reefs, including humans, it appears that nature has a built-in defense against such misinformation-induced dysfunction.鈥�

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