Quantitative Analysis of the Swimming Movements of Flatfish Reacting to the Ground Gear of Bottom Trawls

Two typical responses have been documented for flatfish when they encounter the ground gear of bottom trawls: herding response and falling back response. These two responses were analyzed from video recordings of fish and were characterized by time sequences for four parameters: swimming speed, angular velocity, acceleration, and distance between the fish and the ground gear. When flatfish displayed the falling-back response, absolute values of the three swimming parameters and their deviations were significantly higher than those during the herding response. However, the swimming parameters were not dependent on the distance between the flatfish and the ground gear, regardless of which response occurred. The dominant periods for most of the movement parameters ranged from 2.0 to 3.7 s, except that no periodicity was observed for swimming speed or angular velocity during the falling-back response. However, variations in the four parameters during the falling -back response revealed greater irregularity in periodicity and higher amplitudes. This complex behavior is best described as a chaos phenomenon' and is discussed as the building block for a model predicting the responses of flatfish to ground gear as part of the general understanding of the fish capture process.