A team of researchers has discovered that the trumpet fish is a “stealthy swimmer” that hides behind others to get closer to its prey. undetected and hunt them down.
This is explained in a study published in the journal ‘Current Biology’. It’s about the first evidence of a marine predator that swims behind another fish before hunting in order to reduce the probability of being located by its prey.
The study provides the first experimental evidence that the trumpet fish (‘Aulostomus maculatus’) can hide by swimming behind another fish while hunting, and reduces the probability of being detected by its prey.
In this ‘shadow’ behaviour, the long, slender trumpet fish uses a non-threatening species, such as the parrot fish, as camouflage to get closer to its prey. This is the only known example of a non-human animal using another as a form of concealment.
The investigation involved hours of diving in the Caribbean Sea. “When a trumpet fish swims close to another species of fish, it hides completely from its prey or is seen but not recognized as a predator because the shape is different,” he says. Sam Matchetteresearcher at the Department of Zoological Sciences at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).