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In fish resource assessment, it is very important to know about the behaviour and form of fish schools. This paper describes the three-dimensional (3D) morphology and internal structure of pelagic schools observed using vertical-scanning multibeam sonar. The acoustic data were collected in waters off Venezuela, Senegal, and Mexico. The data were used to derive metrics of school location, density, shape and internal structure from a total of 668 schools: 257 from Mexico, 343 from Venezuela and 68 from Senegal. In general, school shapes were amoeboid-like (e.g. spheres or ellipsoids) and not simply geometric. Also, the fish were patchily-distributed, forming both nuclei (groups) and vacuoles (empty spaces) within the schools. The results support the hypothesis of 'auto-organization of the fish inside schools', meaning that the distribution of fish within a school arises from the elementary reaction of the individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the avoidance behaviour and three-dimensional (3-D) structure of anchovy (Engraulis ringens) and common sardine (Strangomera bentincki) schools mixed in high concentrations in a coastal area of central southern Chile. Observations were carried out during an acoustic survey in January 2002 by means of a vertical echosounder and a multi-beam sonar. The sonar harvested around 900 series of 3-D school images, and 3000 2-D school images were collected with the echosounder. The results showed that all fish aggregations presented the same internal structure, but different global morphologies, from single small schools (with length three times the height) on the edges of the distribution to large dense layers (length more than seven times the height) in its centre. Observation of avoidance in the vertical and horizontal planes indicated that limited vertical diving occurred close to the ship (fish dive from the surface to the 5–10-m depth layer below the vessel), while no horizontal avoidance was observed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Pelagic fishes generally disperse at dusk and aggregate in schools at dawn. The dynamics (duration, variation in school number, and characteristics) of these two behavioural processes have been studied during a 26 h survey in a small area of high fish abundance in the Catalan Sea (Spain). The dynamics of aggregation and dispersion were investigated using a dual-beam vertical echo-sounder (BioSonics) connected to a special school integrator software package (INES-MOVIES-B) which estimates school parameters in terms of size, geometry, and density. This study shows that, during the night, fish dispersion is limited and schools can still be observed. They are characterized by a highly skewed distribution of the cross-sectional area (many small schools plus a few medium and large schools), low values of packing density and biomass, and irregular shape, while during the day there are only a few schools which have a lower variability of the area, high values of packing density, and a more regular shape. The dynamics of schooling are different between dawn (fast aggregation) and dusk (slower dispersion). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyzed the movement of fishing vessels during fishing trips in order to understand how fishermen behave in space while searching for fish. For that purpose we used hourly geo-referenced positions of vessels, provided by a satellite vessel monitoring system, for the entire industrial fleet (809 vessels) of the world's largest single species fishery (Peruvian anchovy, Engraulis ringens) from December 1999 to March 2003. Observed trajectories of fishing vessels are well modeled by Lévy random walks, suggesting that fishermen use a stochastic search strategy which conforms to the same search statistics as non-human predators. We show that human skills (technology, communication, or others) do not result in the fishermen's spatial behavior being fundamentally different from that of animal predators. With respect to probability of prey encounter, our results suggest that fishermen, on average, evolved an optimal movement pattern (mu = 2.00) among the family of Lévy random walks. This Lagrangian approach opens several perspectives in terms of operational management of the pelagic fish stock.