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

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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. .  

Funding

Holsworth Wildlife Endowment Fund

History

Research Project ID

251950958

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  • FAIR assessment completed
  • Institutional review completed

FAIR Self Assessment Summary

This text has been generated from a tool that has been adapted from the ARDC FAIR Assessment Tool Findable -------- Does the dataset have any identifiers assigned? Global Is the dataset identifier included in all metadata records/files describing the data? Yes How is the data described with metadata? Comprehensively (see suggestion) using a recognised formal machine-readable metadata schema What type of repository or registry is the metadata record in? Data is in one place but discoverable through several registries Accessible ---------- How accessible is the data? Publicly accessible Is the data available online without requiring specialised protocols or tools once access has been approved? Standard web service API (e.g. OGC) Will the metadata record be available even if the data is no longer available? Yes Interoperable ------------- What (file) format(s) is the data available in? Mostly in a proprietary format What best describes the types of vocabularies/ontologies/tagging schemas used to define the data elements? Standardised vocabularies/ontologies/schema without global identifiers How is the metadata linked to other data and metadata (to enhance context and clearly indicate relationships)? Metadata is represented in a machine readable format, e.g. in a linked data format such as Resource Description Framework (RDF). Reusable -------- Which of the following best describes the license/usage rights attached to the data? Standard machine-readable license (e.g. Creative Commons) How much provenance information has been captured to facilitate data reuse? Partially recorded

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  • General

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