Small fish are forced to live in schools, in which the large number of potential prey hampers, in addition to other benefits, the hunting of predatory fish and other predators for an individual prey. This effect of predator desorientation is called confusion effect (Neill & Cullen, 1974; Gillett et al., 1979; Milinski, 1979; Landeau & Terborgh, 1986; Smith & Warburton, 1992; including theory Jeschke & Tollrian, 2005; Tosh et al., 2006; Ruxton et al., 2007; Ioannou et al., 2008). To avoid this effect, predatory fish use several tactics to hunt for schooling prey. One of them is eliminating in schools the so called odd prey that differ on their species belonging, shape, size, armour, color and behaviour from the school mates (Major, 1978; Ohguchi, 1981; Theodorakis, 1989; Ranta & Lindström, 1990; Krause & Godin, 1994; Peuhkuri, 1997; Mathis & Chivers, 2003; Jones et al., 2010; Rodgers et al. 2011). ↓ Read the rest of this entry…











Construction has been completed on one of the first Deepwater Horizon restoration projects. The project restored submerged aquatic vegetation at 17 sites where response activities caused scarring of seagrass beds. Seagrass is scarred when motorboat propellers come in contact with the beds. This is what happened in some areas of the Gulf of Mexico during response activities after the BP oil spill. 