A fish can change its stripes: investigating the role of body colour and pattern in the bluelined goatfish

Bluelined goatfish (Upeneichthys lineatus) rapidly change their body colour from a white horizontally banded pattern to a seemingly more conspicuous vertically banded red pattern, often when foraging. Given the apparent conspicuousness of the pattern to a range of observers, it seems unlikely that this colour change is used for camouflage and instead may be used for communication/signalling. Goatfish often drive multispecies associations, and it is possible that goatfish use this colour change as a foraging success signal to facilitate cooperation, increase food acquisition, and reduced predation risk through a ‘safety in numbers’ strategy. Using a novel approach, we deployed 3D model goatfish in different colour morphs—white no bands, black vertical bands, red vertical bands—to determine whether the red colouration is an important component of the signal or if it is only the vertical banding pattern, regardless of colour, that fish respond to as an indicator of foraging success. W

We deployed Remove Underwater Video (RUVS) attached to 3D model goatfish in three different colour morphs; a red and white vertically banded model, a black and white vertically banded model and a plain white model with no banding to examine differences in fish behaviour and interactions in proximity to the different model variants. The RUVs were randomly deployed at 14 sites along the east coast of New South Wales. 

This dataset contains two sheets; 1) abundance and behaviour of individual conspecific or heterospecific fishes around the different colour models; and 2) the total time spent (time-in-view; TiV) by conspecifics and associated heterospecific fish around each colour morph. .