ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Inferring collective behaviour from a fossilized fish shoal.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Air-breathing synchrony in juvenile Arapaima gigas reveals collective coordination under individual physiological constraints.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Anti-Predator Strategies in Fish with Contrasting Shoaling Preferences Across Different Contexts.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Schooling Fish from a New, Multimodal Sensory Perspective.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Extinct and extant termites reveal the fidelity of behavior fossilization in amber.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A statistical method for identifying different rules of interaction between individuals in moving animal groups.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Modern termites inherited the potential of collective construction from their common ancestor.Ecology and evolution · 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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Collective motion by animal groups can emerge from simple rules that govern each individual's interactions with its neighbours. Studies of extant species have shown how such rules yield coordinated group behaviour, but little is known of their evolutionary origins or whether extinct group-living organisms used similar rules. Here, we report evidence consistent with coordinated collective motion in a fossilized group of the extinct fish Erismatopterus levatus, and we infer possible behavioural rules that underlie it. We found traces of two rules for social interaction similar to those used by extant fishes: repulsion from close individuals and attraction towards neighbours at a distance. Moreover, the fossilized fish showed group-level structures in the form of oblong shape and high polarization, both of which we successfully reproduced in simulations incorporating the inferred behavioural rules. Although it remains unclear how the fish shoal's structure was preserved in the fossil, these findings suggest that fishes have been forming shoals by combining sets of simple behavioural rules since at least the Eocene. Our study highlights the possibility of exploring the social communication of extinct animals, which has been thought to leave no fossil record.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.