Fish in larger shoals find food faster

Summary Experiments on shoaling cyprinids hunting for food on patches in tanks demonstrate and advantage of foraging in a group. Individual goldfish (Carassius auratus) and minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus) in a shoal of conspecifics located food more rapidly as shoal size increased from 2 to 20. although shoaling minnows form polarised schools more readily than goldfish, which rarely do so, both species benefited from the trend of speedier food location with increasing group size.