Re: NANFA-- breeding cycles and migrations

Dave Neely (rheopresbe_at_hotmail.com)
Thu, 16 Dec 1999 17:16:15 CST

shireen,

>I. Captive fish and breeding cycles
>What triggers it? Is it something as simple as
>daylight duration? Is it temperature induced?
>Or are there other more complicating factors at
>work? Has this ever been studied in a lab?

Both. If you collect during the Fall, you'll notice that a lot of things
(darters and some cyprinids) get semi-fired up- not to the same extent that
they do during spring, but it's still kind of funny to see. For more good
stuff, try Breder, C.L. and D.E. Rosen. 1966. Modes of reproduction in
fishes. Natural History Press, Garden City, NY. Most decent-sized libraries
have it.

>My second question is about basic fish migration.
>Can anyone direct me to some references on how they
>do it?

This sort of depends on the scale you are interested in, and varies from the
incredible ability of Anguilla to navigate through open ocean to the ability
of tidepool fishes to home back to their tidepool after displacement. They
can use cues like smell, water currents, temperature and salinity patterns,
celestial cues, plane-polarized light, and magnetic field anomalies. Wooton,
R.J. (1992, Fish ecology, Chapman and Hall, NY) is a good place to start and
fairly accessible.

It's a pretty active field, with some neat stuff going on now. There's a
cool paper in Natural History this month on neuroanatomy of various fish- it
seems that mormyrids (african knifefishes) have some pretty amazing
brains...

Short of that, there's a couple of decent introductory ichthyology books out
on the market now, that are good for starting points, including a new
edition of Moyle and Cech, and Carl Bond's classic tome.

cheers,
Dave

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