Browsing by Author "Bossard, Marius Jean-Louis Marc"
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- Coping styles, social status, and behaviour in Mozambique Tilapia groupPublication . Bossard, Marius Jean-Louis Marc; Guerreiro, Pedro Miguel; Saraiva, João LuisThe interest in animal personality has increased considerably in recent years. This interest begun with the animals closest to humans then moving more and more for the entirety of the vertebrate species, including fishes. It is within this framework that it was highlighted that certain species of fish organize themselves in groups with more or less defined patterns. In this study three groups of Mozambique Tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) composed of five or six individuals (with only one male in each group) were formed. Each group was subjected to two tests, a risk-taking test and a curiosity test (new object test). Each test was repeated twice to assess the consistency of behavioral responses over time. Aggression interactions between individuals (visual displays, chasing and biting) were also observed and recorded. The goal was to access the social behaviors of the individuals and to investigate the existence of an organizational hierarchy in each group and to determine whether this hierarchy is repeated. Another objective was to evaluate the possibility of inheritance of these behaviors in the fry of the individuals studied. The results that emerged from the tests were a tendency of the larger individuals in the group to be the proactive fish, regardless of the type of test, although this is not a rule that always applies from one individual to another. Larger individuals tend to be attacked more often than others and are also the less dominant. This dominance of smaller fish in groups is contrary to past studies and opens many questions about the functioning of groups composed mostly of females. The learning ability of individuals was also evaluated during the second test phases. Heredity of such traits could not be tested because of different difficulties detailed in the report, namely the low number of progenies obtained.