Major
Biology
Anticipated Graduation Year
2023
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
Homing, a behavior demonstrated by the threespine stickleback allows an organism to return to their home site when displaced. We predicted that male stickleback fish would home well because they guard their young in nests and have high incentive to return. Here we marked and displaced nesting male stickleback over a variety of distances to see whether homing ability declines with distance displaced. Our results show that stickleback can home, but there was no significant relationship between the distance and return rate. However, some nests were taken over by new males after displacement, meaning that even if the experimental fish returned, they had no nest to access. Removing these “evicted males” from the data reveals a stronger negative trend between distance and return.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Yoel Stuart, professor, department of biology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
The Homing Abilities of Nesting Male Threespine Stickleback
Homing, a behavior demonstrated by the threespine stickleback allows an organism to return to their home site when displaced. We predicted that male stickleback fish would home well because they guard their young in nests and have high incentive to return. Here we marked and displaced nesting male stickleback over a variety of distances to see whether homing ability declines with distance displaced. Our results show that stickleback can home, but there was no significant relationship between the distance and return rate. However, some nests were taken over by new males after displacement, meaning that even if the experimental fish returned, they had no nest to access. Removing these “evicted males” from the data reveals a stronger negative trend between distance and return.