2 replies to this topic

[FirstChAoS]

I noticed in the past minnows fighting in tanks as long as no more aggressive fish their.

I noticed last year (and again this year) schools of brook trout where individual trout spar to be at the head of the pool.

Today I seen a loose school a smallmouth, the larger ones mainly hung back, but if one of the larger bass tried to move forward another will chase it off.

So why do fish who school need to fight each other? Is their an advantage to having a pecking order when they school.

[Matt DeLaVega]

Prime feeding locations?

[centrarchid]

This one of my favorite things to observe, as it impacts my raising fish uniformly to large size quickly. Most fish I work with have capacity to engage in schooling / shoaling (sunfish of any size shoal), pecking order, and outright territoriality. There are times it does not pay to fight at all as it does not increase odds of getting eats so you shoal. There are times when you can displace someone from a good eating location so you start to enforce a pecking order. Then there times when you consistently displace everyone else from a predictable feeding area that becomes your territory. All the black bass do the last as fry although Smallmouth Bass can do it as adults as well. The real fun stuff is with Bluegill and some other Lepomis spp.