Boldness Predicts Aggressiveness, Metabolism, and Activity in Black Rockfish Sebastes schlegelii

Yiqiu Fu,Zheng Li,Xiuwen Xu,Zonghang Zhang,Yanhao Zhang,Zhen Zhang,Fengyuan Shen,Xiumei Zhang

doi:10.3389/fmars.2021.770180

Yiqiu Fu, Zheng Li + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.770180

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Abstract

Animal personality refers to individual behavioral and physiological differences that are consistent over time and across context. Recently, the fish personality has gained increasing attention, especially from the perspective of aquaculture production. Here, we used an important aquaculture species, black rockfishSebastes schlegelii, as the target animal, and conducted a series of experiments to explore the relationships among fish boldness, aggressiveness, locomotor activity, opercular beat rate, standard metabolic rate, and cortisol level. Generally, the results showed that the boldness of black rockfish was significantly, positively correlated with fish aggressiveness, stressed locomotor activity, and standard metabolic rate, while was negatively correlated with stressed opercular beat rate. Bold fish had significantly higher aggressiveness, standard metabolic rate, and stressed locomotor activity but lower stressed opercular beat rate. However, there were no significant correlations between boldness and basal locomotor activity or between boldness and basal cortisol level. These results preliminarily constructed the behavioral and physiological spectrum of black rockfish in the context of fish personality and clearly indicated that the boldness could be used as a discrimination tool to predict fish aggressiveness and metabolic rate, which may have valuable applications for decreasing fish harmful aggression and increasing fish welfare in the aquaculture industry.

Highlights

Differences among organisms widely exist in diverse levels, such as ecosystem, community, species, and population (Sih et al, 2004a)
There were no significant differences in basal locomotor activity (t51 = 1.344, P = 0.185; Figure 3A) and basal cortisol levels (t51 = 0.546, P = 0.587; Figure 4A) between the two clusters
The main results of this study showed that the boldness of black rockfish was significantly, positively correlated with fish aggressiveness, stressed locomotor activity, and standard metabolic rate, while was negatively correlated with stressed opercular beat rate

Summary

Introduction

Differences among organisms widely exist in diverse levels, such as ecosystem, community, species, and population (Sih et al, 2004a). Individual behavioral and physiological differences that are consistent over time and across context are referred to as animal personality (Dingemanse et al, 2010; Réale et al, 2010a,b; Toms et al, 2010; Wilson et al, 2019) It is called temperament (Réale et al, 2007), behavioral. Others found no significant difference in basal cortisol concentration between bold and shy fish, both in rainbow trout and in Atlantic salmon Salmo salar (Øverli et al, 2002a,b; Vindas et al, 2017) This representative discrepancy indicates that fish personality may be highly species- and context-dependent, and the extrapolation seems to be improper given the wide range of fish species and rearing conditions. In recent years, the viewpoint that fish personality studies should put more focus on the practical application has been repeatedly proposed (Castanheira et al, 2017; Wilson et al, 2019), but research works the starting point of which was linking fish personality and aquaculture application are still few

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