About
What is happening below the surface?
Fish cannot tell us how they are experiencing their environment, but they are constantly responding to it in how they breathe, swim, position themselves and interact.
FishInsight is a reference library for measuring and interpreting fish behaviour. By bringing together research evidence, data, practical scoring descriptions and underwater footage, FishInsight aims to make behavioural indicators easier to use and understand.
Behaviour is one of the most immediate ways fish respond to changes in their environment. Changes in behaviour occur in response to oxygen availability, temperature, currents, handling, health challenges, or other sources of stress.
But behaviour is rarely simple. The same behaviour can have different implications depending circumstance, and a change in behaviour does not automatically mean that welfare has deteriorated.
FishInsight focuses not just on what a behaviour looks like, but also on what influences it, how confidently it can be interpreted, and where knowledge gaps lie.
The aim is to make behavioural information useful without over-simplifying.
For each behaviour, FishInsight brings together:
How it is measured: Clear descriptions of how the behaviour can be scored and quantified.
What influences it: The environmental and biological factors known to affect the indicator.
What the evidence says: Findings from published research and available data, presented alongside figures, video, and examples where possible.
What we still don’t know: Important knowledge gaps, limitations, and questions for future research.
Together, these provide a practical starting point for understanding behavioural data and deciding what it can — and cannot — tell us about fish welfare.
FishInsight is designed for anyone who wants to understand fish behaviour and what it can tell us.
For fish farmers, it can help make sense of behavioural changes and monitoring data.
For technology developers, it can provide a reference for identifying, measuring, and training systems to detect behavioural change.
For researchers and welfare professionals, it provides a structured repository for sharing data and information on behavioural indicators, and determining where further research is needed.
FishInsight is not intended to be a definitive catalogue of everything we know about fish behaviour. It is a growing resource that synthesizes the available data and information into clear, succinct guidance while being transparent about uncertainty and knowledge gaps.
As research progresses, new species, behaviours, and data will be added.