Date of Award:

5-1-2007

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Biology

Department name when degree awarded

Life Sciences: Biology

Committee Chair(s)

James W. Haefner

Committee

James W. Haefner

Committee

James A. MacMahon

Committee

Kimberly A. Sullivan

Committee

Todd A. Crowl

Committee

Chris Luecke

Abstract

A considerable amount of research in fisheries exists to assess and predict the success rate of fish attempting to navigate through artificial barriers in their environment. Such barriers typically include dams, culverts, power plants, and pumping stations. This dissertation contributes to fisheries science, and general ecology, by determining how individual-level behavior affects the movement decisions of solitary fish and how simple inter-individual interactions can generate complex forms of collective behavior. The current research improves our ability to model small-scale movement patterns, such as those expected within the artificial restrictions of a water diversion facility, and provides insight into the communication processes in fish schooling behavior. The first chapter validates the behavioral algorithms of an individual-based model that predicts how fish will navigate their way past the barriers found within the confines of a diversion facility. The objective of this chapter is to provide a methodology to test predicted vs. observed movements behaviors at the individual level, and to subsequently determine how they can differentially impact our system-level predictions (i.e., successful passage rates). A complication of this approach is that a substantial number of fish species form schools at some point in their life histories, which is quite relevant to movement studies because individual behaviors within schools are highly interdependent. Therefore, the second chapter explores the influence that neighbors can have on an individual's movement patterns by identifying significant changes in such key factors as preferred swimming direction and swimming speed. Schooling behavior itself is a form of self-organization, in which the emergent dynamics are generated by the interplay of individual-level decisions. In the study of such collective behavior there remains much that is unknown about how individual movement decisions within a group propagate across individuals. The third chapter contributes to our understanding of schooling behavior by modeling how the communication dynamics within a school can vary based on how information is initially disseminated throughout a group. The main contribution of this chapter is to identify intermediate scales of complexity within self-organized groups and the limitations of our current approach to modeling individual interactions in collective animal motion.

Comments

Ecology

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