Marble vs. rainbow trout behaviour study

Methods

Summary

For the behavioral scoring each individual fish will be recorded with a camera in separate tanks for 10 minutes. This will give us an overview of the boldness and the baseline differences in activity of the subject fish. Afterwards, we will use telemetry tracking to study fish behavior in the wild. We surgically implant subject fish with small transmitters and then use mobile antenna to pinpoint their position in the river. The transmitters that we will use last for about 1 month, so that's the time that we will track the fish.

Challenges

The main challenge will be to successfully track all the fish that we release into the river. The fish may get caught by the fishermen, get eaten by other fish or birds or they can also swim out of the studied area. Since we will strive to confirm the fate of all our study fish, any and all these instances will require huge amounts of additional tracking to be performed by the team, until we locate all the individuals or confirm that it is not present nowhere in the river or its tributaries.