Alie Ward

You mentioned anal glands.

Does anyone spurt anything to let other people know there's some danger in the area?

Yeah.

And if you have questions like, is there a fish alarm cue?

Luckily for all of us, there's a 2004 study from the Journal of Animal Behavior titled, Is There a Fish Alarm Cue?

Affirming Evidence from a Wild Study, which, yeah, noted that chemical alarm cues released from injured tissue are not released under any other context, and therefore reliably they inform nearby prey of the presence of a predator.

and that both laboratory and field studies have demonstrated that most aquatic taxa show anti-predator responses to these chemical alarm cues.

You can also see the 2022 study, Attenuation and Recovery of an Avoidance Response to a Chemical Anti-Predator Cue in an Invasive Fish,

Implications for use as a repellent in conservation in the Journal of Conservation Physiology, and it found that these chemosensory alarm cues may prove to be an effective tool in guiding the movement of fish, especially invasive ones, for control or for conservation.

So conservationists could potentially use these odor cues, kind of like a gentler fish cattle prod made out of stress perfume, to guide the fish in order to control these invasive species.

However, they did lab tests with sea lampreys, and if they're exposed to prolonged alarm cues, like if they just keep smelling the danger scent over and over again, I guess the fish just figure someone's crying literal wolf, and they're like, whatever.

So yeah, this might be called, say, flooding the zone.

So not only does it work to desensitize and numb captive fish, but it's also a political strategy employed by dictatorships.

So the term flood the zone, meaning to overwhelm a population with so much bad news or corruption or fear or misinformation that they simply can't keep up.

And then they tune out for survival.

It was actually coined by our current president's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who famously said that the Democrats don't matter.

The real opposition is the media.

And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

There you go.

So whether you're a fish or a human person, this is handy news to keep hold of.