When is it safe to go home? Post-predation assessment of risk and safety when personal information conflicts with social cues

Navigating the risk of predation is a major driver of behavioral decision-making in small fishes. Fish use personal information from olfactory and visual indicators of risk, and also rely upon social cues to inform behavioral trade-offs between risk avoidance and fitness-positive activities such as foraging. Here, fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas), were captured, clipped, and released at 48 field sites chemically labeled with either fathead minnow alarm cue (high risk) or water (low risk). We removed the chemical label after 2 h, then monitored area use by clipped and non-clipped fish. In addition, a shoal was placed in traps in half of the risky and half of the safe locations as a visual social cue of safety. We caught 2919 fish in the first sample, of which 594 were fathead minnows. These were clipped and released. The second sample caught 1500 fish, of which 164 were fathead minnows including 11 bearing marks from the first sample. Fathead minnows and northern redbelly dace in th..., Preparation of chemical stimuli
Chemical alarm cues were collected from 10 adult fathead minnows (mean ± 1 SE total length = 65.5 ± 1.3 mm) collected by seine net from Deming Lake a few days before the field experiment. Fish were euthanized by an overdose of methane tricaine sulfate (500 mg/L MS222) and cervical dislocation (University of Minnesota IACUC protocol #2103-38900A). We measured the total length and then removed the skin from each side of the fish. The length and height of each skin fillet were measured before placing the fillets into a beaker of reverse-osmosis deionized (RODI) water resting on a bed of crushed ice. Keeping the solution cold during skin collection minimized the biochemical degradation of alarm cues. A total of 61 cm2 was collected. We used an immersive blender to homogenize skin fillets in two bouts of 30 s to simulate predation by rupturing epidermal cells. The resulting homogenate was filtered through cheesecloth to remove connective tissue and then dilute..., , # When is it safe to go home? Post-predation assessment of risk and safety when personal information conflicts with social cues

This Excel file has two tabs. The first tab contains the catch data for the first (pre-sponge, no shoals) and second (post-sponge, with jars). Data shown are the number of fish caught by species, and the rank of that catch total within species, within the sample. The second tab shows the recapture rates of clipped fish in the second sample.

Key to variables in the dataset:

### Sheet 1 Catch data

* Set = replicate grouping of traps
* SpongeA1W2 = chemical cue in sponge blocks used to label each site, code 1 is = fathead minnow alarm cue, code 3 is W = blank water control
* ShoalY1N2 = whether an experimental shoal was added in post-sponge samples, code 1 = yes, code 2 = no
* Clip = the fin clip applied to fathead minnows captured in the pre-sponge sample, LP = left pectoral fin, RP = right pectoral fin, LV = left pelvic fin, RV = right pelvic fin
* ...