ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Social interactions among grazing reef fish drive material flux in a coral reef ecosystem.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Lessons in cognition: A review of maze designs and procedures used to measure spatial learning in fish.Journal of fish biology · 2025Review
- A Busse Balloon in the Lagoon: Herbivore Behaviour Generates Spatial Patterns in Coral Reef Ecosystems.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Interspecific dispersal constraints suppress pattern formation in metacommunities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Mixed-species groups of herbivorous reef fishes show variable responses to ecosystem perturbations in the Lakshadweep Islands, India.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Stable isotopes and foraging behaviors support the role of antipredator benefits in driving the association between two marine fishes.Oecologia · 2023Article
- Wild animals suppress the spread of socially transmitted misinformation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Low-distortion information propagation with noise suppression in swarm networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Tutors do not facilitate rapid resource exploitation in temporary tadpole aggregations.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Social calls influence the foraging behavior in wild big-footed myotis.Frontiers in zoology · 2021Article
- TESTING THE CONCEPTUAL AND OPERATIONAL UNDERPINNINGS OF HERBIVORY ASSAYS: DOES VARIATION IN PREDICTABILITY OF RESOURCES, ASSAY DESIGN, AND DEPLOYMENT METHOD AFFECT OUTCOMES?Journal of experimental marine biology and ecology · 2020Article
- Fast behavioral feedbacks make ecosystems sensitive to pace and not just magnitude of anthropogenic environmental change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Mobility and its sensitivity to fitness differences determine consumer-resource distributions.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Intestinal microbes: an axis of functional diversity among large marine consumers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Alarm communication networks as a driver of community structure in African savannah herbivores.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Predator-informed looming stimulus experiments reveal how large filter feeding whales capture highly maneuverable forage fish.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Information limitation and the dynamics of coupled ecological systems.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Article
- Article
- Using social network analysis of mixed-species groups in African savannah herbivores to assess how community structure responds to environmental change.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Conserved behavioral circuits govern high-speed decision-making in wild fish shoals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In human financial and social systems, exchanges of information among individuals cause speculative bubbles, behavioral cascades, and other correlated actions that profoundly influence system-level function. Exchanges of information are also widespread in ecological systems, but their effects on ecosystem-level processes are largely unknown. Herbivory is a critical ecological process in coral reefs, where diverse assemblages of fish maintain reef health by controlling the abundance of algae. Here, we show that social interactions have a major effect on fish grazing rates in a reef ecosystem. We combined a system for observing and manipulating large foraging areas in a coral reef with a class of dynamical decision-making models to reveal that reef fish use information about the density and actions of nearby fish to decide when to feed on algae and when to flee foraging areas. This "behavioral coupling" causes bursts of feeding activity that account for up to 68% of the fish community's consumption of algae. Moreover, correlations in fish behavior induce a feedback, whereby each fish spends less time feeding when fewer fish are present, suggesting that reducing fish stocks may not only reduce total algal consumption but could decrease the amount of algae each remaining fish consumes. Our results demonstrate that social interactions among consumers can have a dominant effect on the flux of energy and materials through ecosystems, and our methodology paves the way for rigorous in situ measurements of the behavioral rules that underlie ecological rates in other natural systems.
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