Fish Movement.

Hello Chaps.
My first post so here goes.

There are a number of things in our lives that start by going in an anti clockwise direction. Athletes on a running track run in an anti clockwise direction.
The water in the bathtub empties in an anti clockwise direction.

More importantly for us anglers, which we could use to our advantage, is that stillwater shoal fish tend to swim in an anti clockwise direction around the lake. Does anybody know why to the above points? Especially the one to do with shoal fish. Many is the time when I have stopped getting bites. But if I cast 20 yds to the right (anti clockwise) I know I will start to connect with the shoal again. There must be a reason?

maybe it's the same reason as the bath water, I wonder if fish shoals swim clockwise in Australia?

Interesting theory. Can't say I've noticed which direction fish tend to move around in lakes (other than away from me!) but that's not to say they don't generally travel a/c. Have you any other observations to back up the supposition? Does the same thing happen whatever swim you are in, or do you usually fish the same bank each time? Do you generally choose a swim with the wind blowing left to right? Could your loosefeed and/or groundbait be ending up further right than you thought?

The sun moves clockwise around the sky, so if they were responding to localised environmental changes one might expect the position of the sun (and consequently shade) to have an influence. If the movement is indeed a/c, the sun would appear to have nothing to do with it. I can't see that the direction of the earth's rotation will have a significant effect on fish movement, as the centrifugal forces involved must be infinitessimal. However, more research definitely needed before any tentative conclusions can be drawn. Until then, bear it in mind.

Sometimes it's not necessary to know 'why' - merely that it 'is'. Sometimes...

What an intriguing post, Chris.

I never thought about generalised shoal fish movements. You are right about water and athletes though, but F1 drivers like to go around clockwise.

Fred Blake said:

the centrifugal forces involved must be infinitessimal

Click to expand...

What about the magnetic forces? I am now racking my brain trying to think which way the carp rotate on a local club water where there loads circulating all the time. Do you know, I am sure it is clockwise as a general rule. Yes, the more I think about the more I am sure. If I stand on the west bank and face east the fish definitely move (in general) in a clockwise direction.

Thanks for your replys lads.
Yes it should be enough to know which way the fish move. But this has happened on more than one lake. I'm sure there must be a reason for moving in an anti clockwise direction. On one lake in particular, the fish can even be timed as to where they will be, and at what point. On another lake, the fish blow all my theory into oblivion (almost) except for the anti clockwise direction.

I am also thinking of magnetic forces, but can't quite nail it just yet.

We ought to ask someone who lives on the equator what direction their fish swim in?

That's a crock of sheep turds. I've seen fish swimming in shoals in different directions to one another clockwise and anti so it's just nonsense.

Interesting. I know you said still water but on the Cut Off channel between Fordham and Hilgay I watched the fish in clear, usually still water during the early part of the season for a number of seasons. This is a few years ago and sometimes there are no fish on view for me to observe. However at the time the fish moved clockwise.
This was more than one species. I can say definitely the Bream and Perch moved in this direction. The Perch would herd the fry along the bank and you could watch the lillies shudder as they came towards you and again as they moved on, this could be followed as they moved up one bank and down the next between the bridges. The Bream were just as easy to see early in the morning aa they would porpoise along the normal there normal patrol route.
It could be down to whether the fish are left or right handed. I can't remember which flying Ace it was that let off a loud bang behind the shed as he was taking a photo of the pilots in the squadron but ninty percent of them all looked over the same shoulder even though the noise was directly behind them.
Some fish will certainly only take a fly that goes past them on a particular side. Sorry I know I'm talking about a river again but I have talked about this with my fishing buddy on more than one instance and he is a massive believer that sometimes Trout will only take down one side. Or maybe some Trout only take down one side. He has proved this to me on the clear waters of the Hampshire Avon where we have presented the same fly to the same fish down one side of the fish a number of times and no interest has been shown but as soon as the fly goes down the other side it takes ( I know there could be millions of reasons for this ). The fish does not appear to be blind in one eye when it is landed and the best explanation we have is that it is a "lefty" or "righty". Not very scientific I am aware.
Also now that I'm thimking of it most of my most memorable fish have gone to there right when hooked. This again could be for almost untold reasons but it could also be because most fish favour one side over the other.
n I'm bound to think of many more instances of fish favouring one side to another but I also go to university on a Thursday and I'll try and ask a fish biologist if fish have a favourite side and have a "handedness".

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Just found the first link. I'm bound to find more.

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http://www.lssu.edu/faculty/gsteinhart/GBS-LSSU/BIOL333-Fish_Ecology_files/Hori 1993.pdf

Sorry Chris, going slightly off on a tangent here but this link is far more interesting than my first one.
It shows that there might even be a link between the handedness of predator to prey fish.
Trying not to be patronising if anyone doesn't know Phenotype is the physical expression of a genotype.
This means something might be carrying both the left or right handed gene (or only left or right handed genes) but it is expressed as being either left or right handed.
Sorry I can see I'm going to post more of these as my interest intensifies. I hope someone else finds it interesting.

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Southpaws: The evolution of handedness - life - 30 April 2010 - New Scientist - mcX's posterous

This one is a good overview of handeness but when you click on the laterlism link you don't get the full article. So much for knowledge being shared. However it does hint thet shoaling fish have a greater tendancy to show handedness than solitary species. I'll try and remember how to use my atlas pass and give a quick acount of the nuts and bolts of the research later.
It appears I'm the only one either on line or interested at this moment and so I'll try and stop posting links untill either tomorrow or I get over excited.

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I didn't say but Chris I think it's a good first thread. Keep them coming!

Fascinating.
Chris/Baz did say shoal fish, and there may be a tie-in between handedness of movement and the "intensity" of the shoaling instinct. At a Sea Life centre (Oban, I think) there's a shoal of marine fish - can't remember which, but they were one of the mini-herrings (sorry, smaller clupeids), and they always swim round in the same way. They are extremely "shoaly" - not always obviously a good idea, as lots of "bait ball massacre" footage shows; but they're still here, so it must work for them in the long run.
When I was a kid, a father and son were fishing wheat on the canal. The son struck too hard, and his line broke above the float. His Dad advised him not to be in too big a hurry to retrieve it... over the next few minutes, the float cruised slowly round in a circle, anticlockwise.
A sample of 1 proves nothing, but it starts you thinking, given the right nudge.

If the shoalies all trundle round in the same direction, what is the best strategy for their non-shoaling competitors? Is it to go in the opposite direction, so that just before each time you bump into the shoal, the invertebrate food critters have been left undisturbed (so presumably easier to catch) for the maximum time? To try and maintain a lead on the shoal so you always reach the undisturbed food first, at the expense of having the pace set by the shoal (and possibly meeting any ambush predators first)? To completely ignore them because they eat diferent stuff?
My brane hurts...

Like most anglers waiting for the next bite, which can sometimes be an hour or more, I/we have lots of time to try and understand or work out what is hapening in our swim. This is when I first noticed that fish were moving in an anti clockwise direction.

My left hand rod would go off, and I would catch anything up to a dozen fish, and I am talking about bream in the 4 - 5lb bracket here. Those bites would dry up, and my right hand rod will start to pick them up again. I have even leap frogged my rods to follow the fish along the bank for upwards of 100 yds. And I am pretty sure I could have folowed them all around the lake if I wanted to. Okay, it might not happen on every water, but it certainly does on some.

Also the bigger the bream, the longer the wait between bites is the norm. Getting into double figure fish, one fish a session is the usual target, if I/you are lucky we might get two specimens a session. Every so often somebody will have a red letter day and twenty double figure bream will be on the cards. But those days are few and far between. So you can see where my thinking time comes from. It took me a number of years to work out that these bigger specimens were also moving in an anti clockwise direction. So canny were they in not giving themselves away. It was hard work.

Mathew, I would be interested to know more, but in laymans terms please if you could. Like Alan my head now hurts.

Fred,
I don't always fish the same bank, but the direction is alaways the same. also I find that the wind direction does not affect the bream, all I am looking for in my chosen swim is a clear spot out of the weed.

Jeff.
but F1 drivers like to go around clockwise.
Would that include F1 Hybrids? (-;

I have only really noticed this sort of thing once. Once being the operative word. So hardly a trend. I watched a shoal of rolling bream move along the lake towards me. It would have been clockwise by the way, had they done a complete loop. In reality they steered a hundred yard straight course, until halted by my groundbait. I feel though that they were just following a lake depth contour. The actions of fish in tanks are probably in no way representative of the wild. In the wild food is always available, and the fish spend a lot of time seeking it. In a tank, fed once a day, they spend the rest of the day bored, and probably swimming in circles, there being nowhere else to go.
I have little doubt that fish display some sort of handedness, but whether that would manifest itself into circular motions about a lake, I must question. We have insufficient data to go on, just the odd example. Carp, it is felt by many, tend to follow the wind. The wind tends to swing one way then the other. It doesn't go North, West, South, East,N,W,S,E... in a regular pattern, yet wind is probably far more likely to have an effect on fish movements than their handedness.
Perch, chasing fry along the margins, might well be affected by the sun, and how well that helps their camouflage and sneak attacks. But as they appear to strike in more or less the same spots repeatedly, they don't seem to be circling the lake. But then again, neither are their prey.

Needs some reliable data.

Hello Chris and everyone. Sorry I'm not going to have any time tonight to look further into this as far as what the scientific community has to say on the matter.
What I would like to say is that my analogy of the fighter pilots was made becuase Aces from both sides new that when they were on the tail of an enemy or when they were being tailed becuase of the pre dominance of right handedness in humans they would invairably dive and turn in a certain direction ( I'll try and find out later the quote exactly ) .
I was trying to show that because fish had "handedness" that they to favoured a certain direction to travel.
This is as far as I have read is my supposition. I still think it is a good working theory until I find any evidence to disprove it, however I'm open to suggestions.
The implications as Chris has pointed out and as are obvious to all of us are that under certain conditions we could use this to our advantage. The more we explore and then understand the better, also the more I realise I don't understand.
Another point is that if Chris is totally wrong and fish just mill about and turn up randomly at food sources or resting places in a haphazard way then it would still be interesting but very unlikely.

Idle speculation alert: read no further if time is precious!
BUT every now and then, you catch a bream that scorches off like blue burgery; **** walker wrote about one. Bill Taylor (the Oxford don who wrote "The Competent Angler" and "Bream Fever" mentioned that catching one of these was nearly always the end of the session - he wondered if they were the "leaders" of the shoal, and that their capture left the rest leaderless and disturbed.
I'm now tempted to suggest they might be left-eyed.
Consider: bream seem to prefer open water to "cover". Their idea of security is an unobstructed view all round, and plenty of pairs of eyes doin' the viewin'.
If most bream are right-eyed, and they sense the danger (usually pike, I'd guess) to be likely to come from the bank rather than the middle of the lake, then they'd end up going anti-clockwise, so their preferred right eyes were scanning the riskier side.
Any left-eyed fish would feel happier on the left of the shoal, and they would be on the alert for threats from the middle of the lake.
With me so far?
Now, what happens when they come upon a groundbaited pitch?
The angler gets line-bites, so he casts short, and starts to catch fish. He'll mostly get fish from the bankward side of the shoal, where the right-eyed majority are used to being. And, all being well, he'll hustle them away without disturbing their mates, and catch more. On a well-fished water, this will be rather same old same-old for the bream.
Then he hooks a lefty, either by casting too far, or because there was a bit of a feeding frenzy going, or because that's all that was left. Lefty hasn't been hooked before, doesn't know the rules, and shoots off in a blind panic, barging everyone else out of the way, kiting across at the end of his run and dragging the line through the whole shoal, who are then thoroughly spooked and clear off.
If someone has a shoal of tagged bream and a way of determining their laterality, there's a project in there somewhere... need a fishin' technician, Guv?

Thanks Mathew.
I now understand what you were saying about handidness, a favoured direction in which to travel. It has been said many times that we should not give fish too much credit for having too much intelligence. But like many people, I can't believe that they move about in a willy nilly haphazard manner,
as there are favoured feeding spots by the species in question. How they get to, or prefer to get to these prefered feeding spots is a worthwhile investigation.

During our times as anglers sat on the banks, we eventually work out the easier parts of watercraft which then becomes the obvious. It is the not so obvious where we come up against a brick wall that holds the key.

I really am Looking forward to anything you can add to the theory. As then by watching and taking note, we will get nearer to the truth.
Once again Many Thanks.

Chris.

Alan, that was intersting and was something I had not given a great deal of thought to before now.

Best and most thought provoking first post I have read for a long time.

I live opposite a silver fish and a carp lake and the carp certainly seem to have a bias towards anticlockwise circulation.

Not invariable tho, there are a few that seem to like to venture out from the corner lilly pads, mooch about in the middle of the lake for a while, and then 180 degrees straight back to the corner. May be because it is basking behaviour, not patrolling / seeking food ?

Another one which likes to cruise in the upper levels of the water and is therefore quite visible breaks all rules by following a repeated wide extended figure of eight path, something like two fifty foot diameters. So one circle anti-c, one c.

You can pretty well time her to the inch and a floating bait dropped just to the side of her path works every now and then. Straight dead ahead of her path doesn't work, presumably because of the sidedness of the Carp's eyes, blind spot dead ahead and above ?

Never discerned any pattern of movement in the silver fish lake. Much more dominated by species territoriality. There's the Perch corner, the corner with the bigger than average carp, the lilly pads with the crucians predominating, the lilly pads with the tench predominating, etc etc. I could draw a pretty accurate species specific map, with areas in between where it is mainly small fry and prey fish. It isn't invariable either, from year to year it changes subtly - especially when a lily bed or suchlike feature has been taken out, cleaned up or moved by a working party, - but it always stays territorial in principle. Perhaps the existence of such territorial areas = "no go" areas for other species ? - impedes / deters circulating behaviour ?

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Lateral thinking, another thought, might it be that it is the water of the lake that is affected by the coriolis effect and rotating ? If something as relatively small as the water in a sink or bath is made to rotate so forcefully then surely a big body of water is likely to be just as much affected if not more ?
So simply making it easier for the fish to - literally - go with the flow ?
Or is it the other way round, large area of water = greater immobility due to inertia ?
Then again, as already pointed out, wind probably has the predominant effect on movement of the water in still waters.
Where's our tame physicist when all this needs to be explained....

This is turning into quite an interesting thread. I like Tyler's theory - even if it does turn out to be nonsense! I don't think such a proposition necessarily implies intelligence on the part of the fish; they are merely behaving according to some basic rules of nature, programmed into them through evolution. A whole shoal of fish may behave in a manner that suggests a degree of intelligence, but individually they are responding to instinct.

The coreolis effect occurs when bathwater is let out; if you had a lake with a huge plug'ole in the middle, and you pulled the plug, you would create a whirlpool effect which, according to science, ought to rotate the same way every time, depending what side of the equator you're on. But there's no reason to suppose the effect exists in a trapped body of water, and if it does, I imagine it would be greatly overwhelmed by circulation caused by the wind.

Wind creates undertow, effectively a current, and most fish like to head into a current. Could it be as simple as that?

The more you read the more fascinating this becomes.
Current Biology - Laterality in a non-visual sensory modality — the lateral line of fish
This article is concerned with handedness in blind fish. I know it's unlikely that any of us will ever fish for this species but it night gives us a clue.
Basically it shows that some fish will "check out" the unknown by favouring one side to the other. They did this by placing new objects in a tank. The fish that were used to the tank but not the object swam around the new object in an anticlockwise direction. This could be checked by putting the oject on the outside edge of the tank or in the middle of the tank.
This meant that the object would be on the fishes right hand side. If it was on the outside edge the fish would swim anticlockwise. However if the object was placed in the middle of the tank then the fish would swim in a clockwise direction.
It could be that in a familiar enviroment fish like to keep the margins next to there most sensitive side, as that is where they are most likely to encounter change. This could be either food or predation etc.
The fact that the species in this study are blind does not concern me overmuch, as it states in the article it is more about the laterlism of the fish than which particular sense is being used. It could just as easily been the eyes as it is known that the same part of the brain is used to "understand" the enviroment as the lateral line.
Getting back to the origonal issue, I still think that the general or usual direction that fish swim is due to the handedness of the fish. This could easily be reversed by the fish being in a vortex in which case it would probably swim against the flow whichever direction that was flowing. I have just read another article on this subject concerning Trout but I assume that most people would find that intuitive anyway so I didn't put up a link.
One thing I would say about humans and intelligence is that just becuase we talk and make machines doesn't mean that most of the things we do isn't out of instinct, just as becuase fish and shoals behave in a certain way doesn't make them "intelligent".
Thanks again Chris for starting this and other people who are thinking about what is going on and why?
Cheers.

Having had a little more time to read and understand some of the links that Matthew has put up, it answers one thing to me. And that is that fish do or can have a bias over one direction to another and that can be for a number of reasons. So that is one part of my question that has been answered.

On the other hand Geof asks, could it be a simple matter of fish following the current or facing into the udertow? And now I know I am now going to sound really silly, but I never even gave that any consideration, as when I am fishing my local canal I am well aware of the undertow and fish accordingly. The surface flows from right to left, but the undertow goes from left to right. That could well be a dominant factor as to which way the shoal will move around a lake.

Some good and interesting theories/facts are coming out here lads.