FEATURE: Fish as friends not food in sharks’ social networks
The research shows "in theory that a flounder could ‘friend’ a cod; a lorikeet could ‘link in’ a magpie; and a dingo could ‘follow’ a wallaby!" Image: Creative Improv/iStockphoto ‘Fish are friends, not food,’ says Bruce the Shark in the movie Finding Nemo, during a group-therapy-style meeting for marine predators. But could sharks and fish really be friends? In a statistical way, they could.CSIRO researcher Dr Grace Chiu and Dr Anton Westveld from the University of Arizona in the US have described how techniques commonly used to study who-tweets-who can be used to understand who-eats-who in the marine food chain. They have published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)1. ‘Most high-school biology students know about food chains,’ says environmental statistician Dr Chiu.‘They’re a way of illustrating feeding or “trophic” relationships between organisms in an ecosystem. An example might be algae is eaten by fish, fish...