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United they wave
Natural History, April, 2002 by Stephan Reebs
Safety in numbers is a principle that applies to many animal groups. Members of bird flocks and fish shoals check for predators less often and spend less time hiding in shelters than do solitary individuals. Now two researchers from Kenyon College in Ohio have shown that barnacles, too, profit by togetherness. Working at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on an island in the Bay of Fundy (between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), Robert Mauck and Kelly Harkless collected barnacle-bearing rocks from the intertidal zone and set them up in a shallow tank. Once the barnacles extended their cirri (fanlike, food-gathering appendages) and started waving them about to collect nutritious particles in the water, the researchers cast a shadow over them with a piece of cardboard. Alarmed, all the barnacles retreated underneath their protective plates, but those that lived as part of an aggregation resumed feeding sooner than the loners did. Moreover, by attaching rocks that held a solitary barnacle to rocks that held twenty or more, Mauck and Harkless forced solitaries to become part of a group. These former loners then adjusted their behavior accordingly. The researchers think that barnacles may detect chemicals or rock-borne vibrations coming from neighbors and thus sense that a crowd has formed. ("The Effect of Group Membership on Hiding Behaviour in the Northern Rock Barnacle, Semibalanus balanoides," Animal Behaviour 62:4, 2001)
Stephan Reebs is a professor of biology at the Universite de Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada. He is the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium and in the Wild, recently published by Cornell University Press.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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