The schooling and foraging ecology of lake herring (Coregonus artedi) in Lake Opeongo, Ontario, Canada

We used a combination of suspended gill nets and hydroacoustics to investigate the schooling behaviour of lake herring (Coregonus artedi) in Lake Opeongo, Ontario, Canada. Lake herring form schools during the day but are dispersed at night and this change occurs at a light threshold of roughly 0.04 lx. Schools range in maximum linear dimension from 100 to 2300 cm with the majority under 1000 cm. The light threshold for school formation is well below that at which their principal predator, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), are able to detect prey. This suggests that schooling may provide advantages in addition to predator avoidance. We observed that lake herring stomachs were fuller during the day than at night, indicating that schooling herring forage more efficiently during the day than individual herring do at night. Furthermore, herring stomach fullness increased with school size, suggesting that schooling enhances foraging opportunities for individual members. We speculate that this is due either to social facilitation of feeding when herring are in the presence of conspecifics, or to corporate vigilance, or "many eyes", which allows individual fish to spend less time being alert to predators and more time feeding.