Schooling (fish)

Schooling is coordinated swimming in which fish maintain alignment and spacing within a group. It is more organized than shoaling, the broader tendency of fish to associate.

Collective animal behavior: Group-level patterns that emerge from interactions among animals following local behavioral rules. Schooling is a collective pattern generated by individual fish responding to neighbors.
Shoaling and schooling: Shoaling is social association among fish; schooling is coordinated movement with aligned direction and spacing. The distinction separates a coordinated school from a group that merely stays together.
Collective robotics: The design of robot groups that coordinate through local interactions rather than centralized control. Roboticists adapt principles of fish-school coordination to groups of autonomous machines.
Predator confusion effect: A proposed reduction in a predator’s targeting success when many similar prey move together. Dense, moving schools can make it harder for predators to select and pursue one fish.
Herring: A group of small, schooling marine fishes in the family Clupeidae. Herring form large, dense schools that are widely studied in marine ecology.
Self-organization: The emergence of organized structure from local interactions without centralized control. Fish schools coordinate movement without a leader directing the group.
Lateral line: A sensory system in fish that detects water movement and pressure changes around the body. It can provide information about nearby fish and the flow their movement creates.
Swarm intelligence: Collective problem-solving that emerges from interactions among relatively simple agents. Schooling is a biological example of coordinated group behavior studied in swarm systems.
Dilution effect: A reduction in an individual’s chance of being attacked when it belongs to a group of potential targets. A fish in a school shares the risk of an attack across many group members.
Sardine: A small pelagic fish commonly found in large shoals and schools. Sardine schools can form conspicuous moving aggregations in coastal waters.

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