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That's what Valerio Sbragaglia, an ecologist at the
Berlin Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology, and
recreational spearfisher wanted to find out. He chased
more than 1,300 fish off the coasts of France and Spain
between May and October 2016, sometimes carrying
a speargun and sometimes not. By measuring their
flight initiation distance (FID), Sbragaglia discovered
that fish flee from speargun-wielding divers at a much
greater distance than from those without.
The ecologist and his colleagues came up with two
possible explanations: Either spearfishers had killed
the boldest fish, leaving only their more skittish counterparts,
or the fish most frequently targeted have
learned to recognize a diver bearing a weapon....
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