Models as Media

As demonstrated in the previous chapters, Charles Breder was right when, in an early article, he referred to fish schools as ‘notoriously difficult laboratory materials’ – a characterization that applies just as well, if not more so, to studying them in the open sea. Alongside the efforts being made to gain empirical data about the control logic and organization of schools by means of various observational and analytic systems, a second (and complementary) strategy explored models and mathematical formulas in order to describe the dynamics and functions of biological collectives. Models, after all, provide the opportunity for drawing connections between different scales of observation and between different influential variables. They offer access to levels that the technical methods of visual or acoustic analysis cannot access, and they combine theoretical considerations and empirical data. However, two further sets of problems have to be considered in this context which exceed the difficulties that I mentioned in the previous chapter – namely the question of viewpoint, the feasibility of convincing experiments in research aquariums, and the revealing of visual ‘invisibilities’ by acoustic methods. One issue concerns the ways in which the relationality of schools could be converted into models and how to measure the epistemic value of such models in conjunction with other forms of knowledge production in the field of biology.