No way: fish are smarter than thought | Life & Knowledge

Dory the surgeon fish is the likeable, dim-witted heroine in the Pixar film “Finding Nemo.” Her poor memory is legendary. And fish in general are said to have equally poor memories.

But they are not nearly as demented as everyone thinks. Australian researchers have now discovered that the animals actually have an extremely good memory.

In a series of experiments, Professor Culum Brown of Macquarie University in Sydney found that rainbow fish could navigate their way through a simulated Trawl for up to a year. “No matter where you go in the world, people have very, very low expectations of the memory of a fish,” said Brown.

Fish trick fishermen

This cannot be the case because they would not be able to learn new behaviours or adapt to changes in their environment.

To prove that the aquatic creatures are smarter than expected, the scientist developed an experiment, reports the “Daily Mail”To do this, he placed them in a tank with a miniature model of a trawl net in which he had cut a hole as an escape route. Over time, the fish found the hole more and more quickly.

“At the end of four or five attempts, they were swimming calmly in front of the net. Halfway through the Aquarium they literally turned around and swam right through the hole. And I just thought, wow, this is incredible,” Brown says. When he put the fish back in the device 11 months later, they were still able to find the hole on the first try.

Goldfish aren’t that stupid either

Even goldfish are smarter than their reputation. In 2022, researchers at the University of Oxford trained nine specimens to swim exactly 70 cm across their tank before receiving a treat. scientist found that the fish used stripes on the walls of the tank to map their environment – ​​just as fish in the wild would use rocks and seaweed.