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Intro & Methods


schooling fish Bermuda another school of fish


 Results
     Of the 16 groups that I got samples from 14 of these consisted of varying amounts of different species and 2 were made up of just one species. Chi-Square test gave me 9 as my test statistic which is higher than the critical value of 3.84 (where the p-value is equal to .05), therefore I can reject the null hypothesis. Groups that consisted of multiple species were made up of varying species with no general trend for one species to be favored over another in amount/group though groups mainly consisted of parrot fish, grunts, and surgeon fish.
Observed             Expected            
Multiple Species148
One Species28
Total1616
Figure 1 shows the Chi-Square table multiple species vs. one species groups
                                                                                                  
Discussion
 
  By rejecting the null hypothesis, that these multi-species schools were there by random chance, I can conclude from my results that  the multi-species schools do indeed serve a purpose and are somehow advantageous, I just don't know how from these results and the data I collected. The samples that I took were all foraging groups so perhaps the it confers some bonus to feeding if one feeds in a group of multiple species rather than just one species. Other studies suggest that feeding in multiple species groups increases foraging time, at least for the ocean surgeon fish(). It's also an interesting point that Whalebone Bay, in comparison to the other two sites, had the largest multi-species groups with twenty or more fish in each of the 6 samples. While I did not get a chance to sample other sites I feel as though Whalebone is somewhat unique for these groups. No other place we snorkeled, except maybe Nonsuch Island, had as large or diverse groups as Whalebone and I feel that it would be interesting to see why that is.