Discover Top Posts Tagged with #fish intelligence

The Manta Ray Has the Largest Brain of Any Fish on Earth. Here's What It's Using It For.

For most of human history, fish were considered simple creatures — driven by instinct, incapable of learning, without memory, without social bonds, without anything resembling the inner life that we associate with intelligent animals. The phrase “a memory like a goldfish” entered common usage as shorthand for the most basic, unreflective kind of cognition imaginable. The manta ray has been…

#coral reef #Endangered Species #fish intelligence #gill plate trade #indonesia #manta ray #marine conservation #Ocean Life

Scientists are finding plenty of clues that fish are more intelligent than anyone imagined.

#fish #fish intelligence #science #marine biology #Australian geographic

The four-inch-long cleaner wrasse can pass a test “smart” animals have completed

A blue wrasse (fish) just passed the mirror test: it saw itself in a mirror with a mark on its body and then tried to rub the mark off.

So now people are bending over backwards to say that the mirror test doesn’t imply self-awareness, it just shows that an animal knows how a mirror works. Which I think has been a valid criticism all along.

However. They’re doing this because they refuse to confront the possibility that a fish might be intelligent. But this fish is from the same genus that uses moray eels as hunting dogs. When confronted with prey in a cave they can’t get into, they go find an eel, do a dance for it, the eel follows them, they do a dance pointing at the cave entrance they want the eel to go into, the eel flushes out the prey, and they catch it and share it. In labs with eel puppets they’ve even been shown to remember which puppets responded to the dance and which didn’t.

So we now have two separate pieces of evidence that wrasse are intelligent. They were picked for the mirror test because they’re social--they’re known to respond to marks on other fish by grooming them--and being social correlates with intelligence. Why is it such a leap to say wrasse are intelligent?

#animal intelligence #fish intelligence

“Fish learn to read alphabet.” From Popular Mechanics, 1930.

Animal intelligence: vintage reading and talking creatures.

#animal intelligence #animal learning #fish intelligence #vintage headline #vintage illustration #smart animal #headline #art #illustration

Tool use observed in fish.

A professional diver exploring the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia recently snapped the first photos of a fish using tools. The diver, Scott Gardner, came across a blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii) that was hovering over a sandy area near a rock with a clam in its mouth. The tuskfish rolled on its side and, with a repeated cracking noise, slammed the clam against the rock until the shell fractured. Here’s one of the photos that Gardner took of the industrious (and hungry) tuskfish:

The tuskfish caught on camera was clearly quite skilled at its task, "landing absolutely pinpoint blows" with the shell. A scattering of crushed shells around its anvil rock suggests that Gardner didn't just stumble upon the fish during its original eureka moment.

Tool use was once thought to be a primarily human behaviour, however the manipulation of tools to achieve preconceived goals is a behaviour much more widespread among animals than was originally thought. Many examples exist, chimps are known to have tool use, and these behaviours are well established in family units. Gorillas are well known to use rocks to crack open nuts, as are capuchin monkeys. Sea otters use a similar technique to open molluscs and urchins.

Dolphins have been observed using a variety of tools (1) (2). In captivity Orang-utans and even dingoes have been observed using tools in order to achieve feats that would otherwise not be possible. Many birds, including keas (a New Zealand parrot) and crows are also capable of tool use

Taken from online blog, Animal Wise. Source: http://animalwise.org/2011/07/12/tooling-around-underwater/

And online News article. Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/diver-snaps-first-photo-of-fish-.html?ref=hp

The research paper regarding this tuskfish behavior, was published in the academic journal: Coral Reefs, the official Journal of the International Society for Reef Studies. Source: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h1463564t1t2t00m/?MUD=MP