Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 78, Issue 2, August 2009, Pages 543-548
Animal Behaviour

Social preferences of juvenile lemon sharks, Negaprion brevirostris

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.06.009Get rights and content

Group living in sharks is a widespread phenomenon but relatively little is known about the composition and organization of these groups. In binary choice field experiments juvenile lemon sharks were attracted to conspecifics presumably to form groups. Experiments investigating size assortment preferences indicated that lemon sharks aged 2–3 years (but not 0–1 years) preferred to spend more time with a group of size-matched individuals than unmatched ones. Furthermore, in species association tests lemon sharks spent significantly more time associating with conspecifics than with a sympatric heterospecific, the nurse shark, Ginglymostoma cirratum. These findings enhance our knowledge of group-joining decisions in sharks indicating that active mechanisms can play a role in the formation and composition of shark groups.

Section snippets

Study Site and Sharks

This study was conducted in Bimini, Bahamas (25°44′N, 79°16′W), a small chain of islands approximately 85 km east of Miami, Florida, U.S.A. Lemon and nurse sharks were our test subjects because of their abundance in Bimini, renowned hardiness in captivity, relatively small body size, extensively overlapping home ranges and known heterospecific encounters (Gruber, 1982, Gruber et al., 1988, Castro, 2000, Pratt and Carrier, 2001; T. L. Guttridge, unpublished data).

Behavioural Experiments

A total of 42 juvenile lemon

Social Preference Experiment

All test sharks used in the binary choice experiments visited both compartments of the experimental pen. In treatment 1 (no sharks versus no sharks) juvenile lemon sharks indicated no preference for either side of the experimental pen (paired t test: t14 = 0.665, P = 0.517). In treatment 2 (one shark versus zero sharks) and treatment 3 (four sharks versus zero sharks), juvenile lemon sharks showed a significant preference for the compartment with the shark/s present based on cumulative time spent

Discussion

This study demonstrates that juvenile lemon sharks actively prefer to be social. Test sharks chose to spend more time in an association zone that was adjacent to a compartment with one or four stimulus sharks present versus an empty one. Although widely recognized in many shark species (Heupel and Simpfendorfer, 2005, Hight and Lowe, 2008), grouping behaviour has yet to receive the attention that it has been given in other taxa such as cetaceans (Lusseau 2003), primates (Strier et al. 2002) and

Acknowledgments

The study was supported by a Leverhulme study abroad studentship awarded for postgraduate work to T.L.G., J.K. and D.P.C. were supported by grants from the EPSRC and the NERC (NE/E001181/1), respectively. We also thank the numerous volunteers and staff members at the Bimini Biological Field Station who worked so hard to obtain the necessary data set. The study would not have been possible without financial support from the Bimini Biological Field Station, Lacy Hoover, Earthwatch Institute,

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      The rho and W-statistic were then compared to the appropriate null model to reach the P-score in the same fashion as previously described. Sex was not included in our analysis due to previous semi-captive studies showing no impact on the social preferences of juvenile N. brevirostris (Guttridge et al., 2009b) Individuals were found to socialize significantly more with familiars over the full hour of observation than would be expected by random (Table 3).

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    S. H. Gruber and K. S. Gledhill are at the Bimini Biological Field Station, South Bimini, Bahamas.

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    D. P. Croft is at the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, University of Exeter, Perry Road, Exeter EX4 4QG, U.K.

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    D. W. Sims is at the Marine Biological Association, Citadel Hill, Plymouth PL1 2PB, U.K.

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