The usefulness of acoustic telemetry on the study of movements, interactions, and behaviors has been revealed by many field and laboratory studies. The process of attaching acoustic tags on fish can, however, impact their physiological, behavioral, and growth performance traits. The potential negative effects are still unknown for several species and behavioral attributes. Previous studies have attempted to shed light on the effects of tag implantation on fish, focusing mainly on fish growth and physiological parameters, and one or two behavioral properties mainly on the individual level. However, the effect of this procedure could also be expressed at the group level. This study investigated the short-term effects of dummy and active body-implanted acoustic tags on the group-level swimming performance of adult European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) using optical flow analysis. We studied four main swimming performance properties-group speed, alignment (polarization), cohesion, and exploratory behavior. To help in the interpretation of any detected differences, physiological stress-related parameters were also extracted. The results show that the tag implantation procedure has variable effects on the different swimming performance attributes of fish. Group cohesion, polarization, and the group's exploratory tendency were significantly impacted initially, and the effect persisted but to a lesser extent two weeks after surgery. In contrast, group speed was not affected initially but showed a significant decrease in comparison with the control group two weeks postsurgery. In addition, the physiological parameters tested did not show any significant difference between the control and the treated group 14 days after the onset of the experiment. The findings suggest that the effect of tagging is non-trivial, leading to responses and response times that could affect behavioral studies carried out using acoustic telemetry.

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IntroductionFarmed fish like European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) anticipate meals if these are provided at one or multiple fixed times during the day. The increase in locomotor activity is typically known as food anticipatory activity (FAA) and can be observed several hours prior to feeding. Measuring FAA is often done by demand feeders or external sensors such as cameras or light curtains. However, purely locomotor-activity-based FAA may provide an incomplete view of feeding and prefeeding behaviour.MethodsHere, we show that FAA can be measured through passive acoustic telemetry utilising three different approaches and suggest that adding more means to food anticipation detection is beneficial. We compared the diving behaviour, acceleration activity, and temperature of 22 tagged individuals over the period of 12 days and observed FAA through locomotor activity, depth position, and density-based unsupervised clustering (i.e., DBSCAN).ResultsOur results demonstrate that the position- and density-based methods also provide expressions of anticipatory behaviour that can be interchangeable with locomotor-driven FAA or precede it.DiscussionWe, therefore, support a unified framework for food anticipation: FAA should only describe locomotor-driven FAA. Food anticipatory positioning (FAP) should be a term for position-based (P-FAP) and density-based (D-FAP) methods for food anticipation. Lastly, FAP, together with the newly defined FAA, should become part of an umbrella term that is already in use: food anticipatory behaviour (FAB). Our work provides data-driven approaches to each FAB category and compares them with each other. Furthermore, accurate FAB windows through FAA and FAP can help increase fish welfare in the aquaculture industry, and the more approaches available, the more flexible and more robust the usage of FAB for a holistic view can be achieved.