Of course, centralising social behaviour classifications from within the published literature is crucial too, and ShoalBase is also built for that purpose!

9/9 If you’ve ever watched fish, in the field, a tank, while fishing, or on a dive, you already have data that matters! Everyday observations are incredibly valuable. We’d love your contributions, ideas, dream features, and feedback!

8/9 The long-term goal is to create the largest open resource on fish social systems built on community science and open data.

7/9 The interactive Explore page already shows emerging patterns by species, country, habitat, and life stage even with early submissions. As the dataset grows, so will the depth of analysis.

6/9 What can the data be used for? Mapping global patterns, improving welfare and husbandry, informing fisheries and conservation, generating new hypotheses, and highlighting major knowledge gaps.

5/9 Who can contribute? Anyone who watches fish - researchers, divers, aquarists, students, naturalists, recreational or professional fishers. The form takes 1-2 min and guidance is provided.

4/9 Why does this matter? Because social systems influence survival, vulnerability, welfare, and how species respond to environmental change. For most fishes, that information simply doesn’t exist in any accessible form.

3/9 What do we mean by “social behaviour”? Broad, consistent categories like: schooling, shoaling, pairing, solitary, territoriality, courtship, group size, parental care, aggression, and more.

2/9 ShoalBase is a global, open database of fish social behaviour; a place to collect observations that usually stay unpublished, unseen, or scattered.

Isn't this the goober who constantly whines about being silenced? Then why can't I escape seeing or hearing him every time I look online.

(7/7) With @helenanorman.bsky.social, @cortesedaphne.bsky.social, Amelia Munson, and @jlindstrom.bsky.social.‬ What do you think – is it time to move beyond the fiction of constant baselines?

(6/7) The solution isn't to abandon SMR, but to refine measurements: either integrate across sleep-wake cycles for daily estimates, or match measurement states to your biological question. Shifting from static to dynamic baselines will provide more meaningful estimates of organismal energetics.

(5/7) Size, age, social environment, abiotic factors all affect sleep architecture. Correlations btwn SMR & behaviour, environmental effects on SMR/AS, heritability, scaling relationships - all could be confounded with sleep-wake states and partitioning of maintenance processes.

(4/7) Another issue: due to partitioning of different functions between sleep and wakefulness, treatment or environmental effects on SMR via effects on specific functions (e.g. protein synthesis) may be missed entirely if you measure during the wrong state.

(3/7) We modelled the consequences: Sleep-only measurements underestimate daily integrated energy costs. Wake-only measurements overestimate them. The bias isn't random - it follows predictable patterns based on variation in individual or species sleep architecture.

(2/7) The problem: Different maintenance processes happen at different times. Ion regulation & thermoregulation are active during wake. Protein synthesis, many brain functions, immunity peak during sleep. How “maintenance” is defined and what constitutes SMR depends entirely on WHEN you measure it.