This book is about the behaviour of teleosts, a well-defined, highly
successful taxonomic group of vertebrate animals sharing a common body
plan and forming the vast majority of living bony fishes. There are over
22000 living species of teleosts, including nearly all the fish of
importance in commercial fisheries and aquaculture. Teleosts are
represented in just about every conceivable aquatic environment from
temporary desert pools to the deep ocean, from soda lakes to sub-zero
Antarctic waters. Behaviour forms the primary interface between these
effective survival machines and their environ- ment; behavioural
plasticity is the key to the success of the teleost fishes. In the
decade before the publication of the first edition of this book (1986)
the study of animal behaviour underwent revolutionary changes under the
dual impact of the new fields of behavioural ecology and sociobiology.
Quantitative, experimentally-verifiable hypotheses about why individual
animals behave were formulated for the first time and met with
considerable success. Much of the early work in these new fields
concentrated on birds and mammals, but material presented in the first
edition of this book helped to demonstrate that fish behaviour is not
just a simplified version of that seen in birds and mammals. but obeys
the same ecological and evolutionary rules. In the five years since the
first edition. much of the early theory has matured: optimal solutions
to the problems of feeding and mating require subtle trade-offs of
energy balance.
