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Clonal fish that are reared under nearly identical, highly standardised environments systematically differ in the number and size of offspring per reproduction cycle, two crucial indicators of biological fitness.

Animal behavioural research is fascinating, not least because it reveals information about how we humans interact with each other as social beings. Behavioural biologists at IGB are deeply involved in exploring the ways in which communities, such as schools of fish, make decisions and the factors that influence individuality. 

A team of behavioural ecologists from IGB and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) is investigating how animals hunt in groups. Animals in water hunt differently than animals on land, which is partly due to the different size ratio between predator and prey. One example is striped marlin, which belong to the billfish family. Motivation may play a greater role than dominance hierarchy during resource division, but the large fish get out-competed by sea lions when the two predators attack the same prey.

Little is known about how biological systems like the brain or a swarm of fish manage to optimally bring together a multitude of individual pieces of information from different locations. There is a hypothesis according to which the best performance of the brain lies at the border between order and chaos, in the state of so-called criticality. Researchers of the Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence" from Humboldt-Universität (HU), the Technical University of Berlin (TU), and IGB have now been able to demonstrate this hypothesis on a large school of fish.

A team of researchers from IGB and the Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence" at the Humboldt University zu Berlin has now shown for the first time in naturally clonal fish that genetically identical individuals already differ in their character traits on the first day of life and that these early character differences significantly shape the behavior of the animals into adulthood. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Using a robotic fish, the team of David Bierbach and Jens Krause has shown that guppies can anticipate the behavior of their artificial conspecific and predict both the direction and dynamics of its movements.

Jens Krause has published a review study on the social influence of rule breaking. Together with his co-author Marcel Brass, he explains why rule breaking is contagious and how knowledge about it can be used to prevent it.

Researchers at IGB have found that the Mexican waves collectively produced by tiny fish in Mexico actually reduce both their predatory birds' propensity to attack as well as the birds’ hunting success.  Functionally, these waves may work as a signal from the fish to the birds: “We know you are there, don’t waste your time on attacking us!”