Schooling Behavior of Fish: General Ideas, Terms and Concepts, Prevalence, Applied Aspects

Abstract

The article opens a thematic issue of the Journal of Ichthyology, dedicated to Dmitry Viktorovich Radakov, a researcher who made an outstanding contribution to the knowledge of schooling behavior of fish. The article deals with many terms and concepts that are widely used in scientific publications on the schooling behavior of fish, but still do not have a generally accepted definition—crowd, aggregation, shoal, school, flock. Attention is drawn to the difficulties caused by the fact that the use of these terms is most often based not on objective criteria, but on the preferences, views or beliefs of individual researchers. General ideas about the prevalence of schooling behavior in fish of different taxonomy, lifestyle, condition and age; about the importance of the visual structuring of the environment for the manifestation of schooling, about the difficulty of dividing fish into facultative and obligate schooling, about the importance of knowledge about schooling behavior for solving applied problems have been considered.