Two Issues in Modelling Fish Migration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mathematical model for fish migration, addressing biological mechanisms and observation accuracy, and demonstrates how migration can be characterized by an optimal control principle.

Contribution

It proposes a novel minimization principle for modeling fish migration and evaluates the reliability of manual observation methods using numerical case studies.

Findings

Migration can be modeled as an optimal control problem.

Manual observation methods may yield unreliable estimates.

The model helps understand biological and observational aspects of fish migration.

Abstract

Fish migration is a dynamic phenomenon observed in many surface water bodies on the earth, while its understanding is still insufficient. Particularly, the biological mechanism behind fish migration is not fully understood. Moreover, its observation is often conducted visually and hence manually, raising questions of accuracy and interpretation of the data sampled. We address the two issues, mechanism and observation, of fish migration based on a recently developed mathematical model. The results obtained in this short paper show that fish migration can be characterized through a minimization principle and evaluate the error of its manual observations. The minimization principle we hypothesize is an optimal control problem where the migrating fish population dynamically changes its size and fluctuation. We numerically investigate alternating and intensive observation schemes as case studies, demonstrating that in some realistic conditions the estimate of total fish count is not reliable. We believe that this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of fish migration.