ArticleScience advances2025
Better and faster decisions by larger fish shoals in the wild.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Ocean acidification, more than warming or heatwaves, constrains shoaling behaviour in a range-extending fish through habitat simplification.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- The wisdom of crowds emerges in flocks of thousands of migrating songbirds.Science advances · 2026Article
- Decision-making in shoaling: zebrafish integrate cues of familiarity and group size.Animal cognition · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studies on collective cognition provide many examples of how the efficient spread of information within groups leads to benefits with increasing group size. However, little is known if groups also amplify maladaptive information such as false alarms and whether such costs reduce possible benefits. Here, we investigated wild fish shoals responding collectively with escape dives when attacked by birds. We analyzed the collective response in reaction to bird attacks and similar but harmless flybys as a function of shoal size. Larger shoals increasingly detected predator attacks (i.e., true positives), while their response facing harmless flybys (i.e., false alarms) remained constant. Furthermore, decision time decreased with increasing shoal size. Larger shoals were thus able to simultaneously overcome two major trade-offs inherent in solitary decision-making: the trade-off between true and false positives and the trade-off between speed and accuracy. Our findings set the stage for the next generation of studies investigating the mechanisms underlying collective decision-making.
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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.