Behavioural Ecology of Fishes PDF

PREFACE

This volume is based on the proceedings of a conference of the same name held at the Ettore Majorana Centre, Erice, Sicily, in October 1991. The conference was organised because it was felt that the discipline of behavioural ecology is at something of a turning point, with the classic explanatory theories being reformulated in the light of new empirical evidence and with new techniques and areas of interest becoming apparent. For this reason, an overview of the subject was felt to be timely. Teleost fishes are, in many ways, extremely suitable subjects for research into behavioural ecology, and many important studies have used this group. Therefore, we felt that the current state of behavioural ecology and the prospects for the future could be well documented by considering work on fishes, allowing a reasonably concise but complete treatment of the topic. Four main areas of interest were identified, and key researchers invited to give talks in which they first reviewed the current status of their research field and then illustrated important points with reference to their own work.

The meeting duly went ahead and was generally agreed to be informative, stimulating and productive. Good conferences do not necessarily make good books, but it was felt that the talks made a sufficiently coherent whole to justify producing a publication along the same lines. The presentations at the meeting have therefore been altered and refereed to form the nineteen articles of this volume. The organisers and participants of the conference would like to thank the Ettore Majorana Foundation and the staff of Ettore Majorana Centre for both financial and logistic support for the meeting and Professor Danilo Mainardi, director of the School of Ethology at the Ettore Majorana Centre, for his support.

Author: Felicity Anne Huntingford