Aquariums: Aquarists: your fish observations can help build a global database of fish social behaviour

Hi all,

I’m a fish biologist at the University of Glasgow and I work on how fish behaviour and physiology interact in the wild, and I’m reaching out to the aquarium community for help with a project we’ve just started.

One thing that’s always surprised me is that for most of the ~35,000 fish species on Earth we still don’t have a centralised, accessible record of whether they live alone, form shoals, school, or shift their social behaviour as they grow or as conditions change. The information exists, but it’s scattered across papers, books, field notes, hobbyist experience, and personal observations, and a lot of it is effectively lost because it’s never been brought together. That makes it surprisingly hard to use in research, conservation, fishkeeping, and teaching.

So we’ve started building ShoalBase.org, an open global database of fish social behaviour. I’m posting here because aquarists are some of the people who observe these patterns most closely, often in species for which behaviour has never been formally recorded. You see things that rarely make it into the scientific literature, and that kind of long-term, close observation is incredibly valuable.

On ShoalBase you can look up species and explore what’s already known, but I’d really encourage you to add your own observations. It doesn’t have to be anything unusual, as even a simple note that a species you’ve kept was usually solitary, shoaling, schooling, territorial, or changed behaviour with group size is genuinely useful. Informal contributions are completely fine, they’re simply tagged by observation type and source, and submitting a record is just a short Google form that takes a minute or two.

I’d also genuinely love feedback from this community. The long-term goal is to build something that’s useful for both research and the hobby! Thanks for reading, and for the huge amount of fish knowledge that exists in this community.