Naturally speaking shorts. Hello and welcome to Naturally speaking shorts. Some animals have a reputation for being highly intelligent, for example dolphins, dogs, elephants or crows. However, when it comes to smarts, other species don't have such a good reputation.
In this episode of Naturally speaking, we're going to be addressing the contentious topic of fish intelligence. My name is Tae Afford and today I'm joined by four experts to discuss the question, how smart are fish? Felicity Huntington has worked on the behavior of fish for more than 45 years, having a special interest in their social interactions and how they avoid predators. She served as the president of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles and the World Council of Fisheries Societies and is the 2016 Buckland Professor of Fisheries.
Charles Dardine is a renowned angler with extensive knowledge of fish, their behavior and the ecosystems that support them, gained through a lifetime of angling and fly fishing. He started fishing at age three and was fly fishing at six. Charles was written as an angling columnist for the Daily Telegraph and is a contributor to fly fishing magazines and wrote to the B's Guide for Fly Fishing, which is the best-selling book of the genre. Marshall Bisset is an enthusiastic saltwater fly fisherman from Southern California.
He's a flycasting instructor and is head of his local fly fishing association. Martina Quagioto did her master's degree in marine biology at the University of Treste in Italy and the NIB Marine Biology Station in Slovenia. She completed her PhD here at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine on scavenging ecology and coastal marine systems. Now she collaborates with Professor Huntington on the topic of how smart our fish.
So welcome, many thanks to all of you for joining today. Felicity, can I start by asking you, why are we here talking about the smartness of fish? Well, as you said, there's a very prevalent view of fish as not being smart at all, but they're robot-like animals with very little capacity for learning and classically our 15-second memory window. You can see it in the business film Finding Nemo, the glory against everything.
Now I've been lucky enough to spend 45 years studying fish behavior and watching fish, and I just know that that's not true. I'm not the only one. There's quite an extensive literature that shows that that's simply not true. And so when I was asked by the Buckton Foundation to be the Buckton professor for 2016, I'm allowed to talk about any topic that's relevant to fish biology or fisheries and the idea is outreach, public understanding science.
I thought I would like to, it would be both useful and relevant to speak about the smartness of fish and the impact that that has on various aspects of fisheries. And the reason why I think that's important is partly because it's frustrating if there's an idea out there which is simply wrong. And also I think because if people think that fish are stupid, in some respects it encourages one to undervalue fish and perhaps not care about conservation. So people sometimes justify concern with the conservation of dolphins by saying, well, this is smart.
We have to conserve them. I would say fish are wonderful. We have to conserve them. So you use the word smart.
What exactly do you mean by smart? How do you go about evaluating fish intelligence? I deliberately use the word smart rather than a more technical sounding term like cognitive ability, for example, because I wonder what word that's in common language. And so when I use it, people know, broadly speaking what I'm talking about.
I can be a bit more precise and there are a number of criteria, at least three criteria that I think in an ideal world we would have to know about behaviour to legitimately claim that it's smart. So if I could illustrate that by talking about archer fish, these are little fish that live in a manner of swamps and they catch the field on terrestrial insects, which they dislodge from the leaves above the swamp by spitting with incredible precision. They did a comparison of the accuracy of archer fish compared to the competition of a rifle shoot and the archer fish come out better. As adults they're incredibly accurate.
And in order to be able to defeat like that, you have to have really good visual discrimination. You have to be able to fish. You have to be able to really tell what's true, what isn't true, for quite a distance and it may be moving around. You have to be able to get the angle of spitting right and the distance of spitting right, allowing for the fact that you get refraction at the water surface.
And how much refraction would depend on how far away, quite complicated, computation. And also if you don't want to blast the Arnold King and Kong, you have to match the strength of your spit to the sickness. So there are other things they have to be able to do. So if you take fine visual discrimination, last year an experiment was published where they had archer fish in the lab and they've been trained to spit to visual images on television screen above and they got a food reward if they spat to the right one.
And distinctly in this study with human faces. What the fish had to learn is that that face there you'll never get food from. And whatever the alternative is, spit at that. And they learned to do that very easily with two.
And then they asked how many other faces can they recognize it's distinct from that. If they had the whole face and it was in colour to 44. So that is amazing. Now these were experienced fish.
The experiment wasn't done on immature fish. So we don't know how they would perform. But we do know when it comes to being accurate, when these little fish first start feeling independently. They help us.
They spit all over the place. Too little, too long, wrong direction. But quite quickly, because the reward is food, they learn to do it very accurately and they can even learn not by doing it themselves but by watching the competent artificial. Which is quite remarkable when you think about it.
Because they have to, they have to transpose themselves into demonstrators perspective. So it's quite a remarkable thing. In order to do that, they have to integrate information from different sources and they have to make context dependent decisions. So if they've got good information, they'll go for it.
But if it's misty or they can't see very well, then they don't even try. So learning's involved. They're taking in and assessing information, putting in information from different sources together and they're making context dependent decisions. So I would say that those are the hallmarks of evil that I would want to call smart.
On the other hand, matching the strength of the japs, the stickiness of the prey, which you would think might be almost the most difficult of all. They get these little inexperienced, they shed it right first time. And the reason that they can do that is because apparently in physical terms, there's a very simple one to one relationship between size and stickiness. Natural selection has been able to hardwire them to make it get that bit right.
It's amazing. It's incredibly well adapted, but it's not smart. So that's trying to be a little bit more precise about what we mean. Those are the kind of things that seem to us hallmarks of smart behavior.
But of course, for most behavior, you haven't got that kind of detailed developmental information. So we did a kind of rule of thumb and we went through the comparative psychological literature and we looked at things like small animals like great apes, like cauldids and like cetaceans. And we looked at behavior that was seen to be typical. Why do we think great apes are smart?
Well, because they know the following things. We are very impressed that Florida's scrub jays can't remember where they hid thousands of different, they have a map and they know exactly where thousands of different prey items are. We are impressed if animals use tools because that used to be thought of arguments. And we are impressed if animals cooperate together like me and can't do.
We think that's smart behavior. And if animals do social learning and they have traditions, then we think that's not too. I recognize that's a very anthropomorphic list because there are all things that we are proud of doing ourselves. But that's the way the literature is sort of developed by probing what's special and what isn't special to humans and then gradually putting out the boundaries.
Sounds as though there's evidence out there to suggest that fish have the ability to learn to the similar level as some of these other species that we generally classify as intelligent or is that not quite accurate? I would want it a bit differently. I would say that all the main kinds of learning, classical condition, operating condition, and social learning, that have been described for animals you find in fish. And animals live in different worlds.
In some things, mammals may be better at learning, but in, for example, in the case of spatial learning, fish live in a three-dimensional world. And there's a big literature that shows that they can form really detailed maps on the basis of landmarks in three-dimensional space. They're very good at it. So, very, they should probably do better than humans.
And not only that, but if they approach a landmark from different directions, so it will look different, they can recognize the same object, seen from different perspectives. So, this object permanence, they're fish are very good at that. So I wouldn't say that because they're different kinds of animals living in a different world, that their learning about this will be the same. But they can do the same for all kinds of learning.
And in some cases, they're better than us, in some cases, they might be less good. Martina, if I could turn the question to you, I believe that your research interest is in linking some of these studies on fish intelligence to some of their real-world applications, for example, why an understanding of smartness of fish matters to fishers? Is that something that you could tell us a little bit more about? Yes, of course.
So, together with the research, we check the scientific literature on fish behavior-related fisheries. This is why, because if the fish are smart, they probably have an influence on the effectiveness of the traditional fish. And they have also an influence on the sustainability of fisheries. So all the issues about conservation of fish.
And what it came out, that fisher can actually, because they have the abilities of remembering and memorizing the experience, and then doing also context-dependent decision, is possible that the fish react to fish activity, the fish in pressure. For example, there are some studies looking at fish avoiding nets, trolling nets. And in this particular case, you can find that there is a social learning on how to avoid nets. For example, if you put an experienced fish that already experienced a trolling net, we didn't show the fish naive, so that it would be encountered a trolling net for the first time.
This experienced fish would drive the other naive fish outside the trolling net. And this can be also reflected through different training chain generations of fish. And this is like an example of keeping the tradition, this case of escaping from trolling net, through generation of training generation in this case. Or another example is evidence of cooks.
And we have here two anglers, and probably they will tell us more about that, but there are studies in which the scientists observed that fish that experienced to be hooked, for example, fish that had been caught and released. Once they've experienced once, or maybe a couple of more times, to be hooked, then they would avoid baited hooks, but they would probably avoid also baits, unhooked baits, because they learn that these baits are bad things for them. And this is called hook shyness. And hook shyness can be also transferred socially between fish, because there are some fish that can see what happens to its companion that has been hooked.
And then in their turn, they go to the hooks. It is like a view of how smart fish can affect the efficacy of fish. And then there are, like, in the case of the ability to fish or remembering different shapes or landmarks underwater, according to different angles of view. And this is demonstrated that it's very important for re-introductive areas.
There's being a study that shows that fish follow landmarks or double graphic features of the sea bed, like a reef crest, for detecting their home range. So probably it's important to know these, these are smart abilities of fish, because people like management, conserving fish, actually can be implemented, thinking into account how fish learn, how they navigate, because they can potentially make, for example, more effective. So how is it that you came to be working directly with fishers in your research? Obviously you're doing a lot of collaboration.
What is it that you feel that you can share and learn from these types of collaborations? So we discussed the Felicity and I, and we thought that we have a scientific evidence, and these come from people working with fish hours and hours of serving them. But they are not just scientists, probably there are people, and there are people, like Charles and Marshall, who spent also probably more time than NASA than scientists. And they observe every day fishing and angling on the river bunker or on the sea water.
And this is not just that they have a huge amount of knowledge on fish behavior, but it's also in the air nature explaining to younger generation or transmitting these knowledge. And we found that this is a key point on our mission, that is trying to remove this inaccurate idea that fish are not smart. So together with a combination, a synergetic combination between scientists and fishers, probably we can actually stand up and say that the fish can be smart. Turning to Charles and Marshall, maybe could you tell us a little bit about some of your own personal experiences in how you came into fishing in the first place?
And maybe I can start with just how many days of your life do you think that you've spent out on the water fishing? Way too many. Way too many. And we worked out, didn't we?
It was about, I said, a thousand days. I've been sort of making a fool of myself fishing. But I just, I think out of this, I was very fortunate to be with Felicity when we were doing a joint lecture. And it was fascinating for me to see the other side of the of the case.
I mean, up to now it has been, I'd react to situations, I'd assume, I didn't have any scientific basis for my thought process. And it was interesting, you know, we've heard the scientific side of things. It's nice to, you know, perhaps to get the two colliding. And I think out of that you'll get some very interesting results, probably might be quite fearful of because I think out of that we'll spring other things.
But, you know, if you take something like salmon, you talk about landmarks and rest of it. I mean, the salmon is the most extraordinary thing. I mean, it's born in one river. It goes out to sea.
It manages to find that same river yearing year out, yearing year out. So there must be a sense of understanding of where it was born, what that place means to that particular group of fish. Because you will have salmon, you will have neighbouring rivers, you have the test, you have the avant, and you have the etching. And they're all three rivers, very close together themselves, England.
All of them have different types of salmon running them. And you don't get a mix up. So that is extraordinary. But the thing I think the area I'm wrestling with a bit is when we call it smart, are we calling it instinctive?
You know, this is a bit where I think we're all sort of slightly edging around, well, how do we place this? Do we say it's an instinctive behaviour or a smart behaviour? Because there's a huge difference between the two. And that is where we need the science to come in from the scientists to tell us and explain some of the things that go on.
I think as anglers we all have a vested interest in believing that fish are the most intelligent, highly evolved creatures of all time. It explains our inability to catch them. So you're always hearing about the wily trout and all of that. And that's anecdotal.
In the saltwater conditions in which I fish, I fish for, there's a couple of species that are interesting. And one is the Mahi Mahi, sometimes called the Dorado, sometimes called the dolphin, depending on which part of the United States you come from. And we fish those in small boats with Mexican fishing guides, and the way you fish them is you're out in this blue ocean. They know that there's certain structure that they relate to.
So they start out by throwing a couple of fresh live bait. And that's all fine. And there are, perhaps, there can be as much as 100 fish down there, medium sized small, Dorado will sense that those bait are in the water and they will come up. We, because we've evolved so much as anglers, we're capable of tying perfect replicas of that bait fish and even making them act like bait fish.
So what happens is that for about two or three minutes you can throw out to those fish a perfect replica and they will get in a frenzy and they will equally take the live bait to the replica. But very quickly, they will figure out as more fish come in that when there's two alive and a replica right next to one another, they will only take the live bait. Even though the live bait is not really moving around on the water, they appear to be identical. And then what happens is that very quickly, even if you take away the artificial baits and keep on throwing live bait, they will leave.
They'll leave the scene because they know that something's going on. Roosterfish are in another amazing thing. Roosterfish, I mean a salmon going at its fastest can travel 15 miles an hour. Roosterfish could cruise at that and probably hit speeds of 40 or 50 miles an hour.
And so they have these beautiful combs on their back so you can see them and they chase spores of bait into the shore. They chase them up on the beach. And what they do is they, we were talking about working in cooperation, they corral fish and they work together and they just fly out of the water. They corral little sardines or sardines as they go on in Mexico.
And that's another instance where you can throw into that melee of fish, just that boiling ceiling mouse of fish, perfectly executed imitations. And they will go at 50 miles an hour towards your bait and your part is pounding. These are huge fish, 40, 50 pounds fish. Up to probably 30 or 40 kilos of fish.
And they will just stop inches from that fish and turn and hit the live bait that's right next to it. They will sense that there's something going on and they'll go away. I showed this to you in the time frame, I showed a roosterfish. The time frame it took to ascertain whether it was real imitation.
Right. Sounds like both of you have spent thousands of days fishing, but you can both find some good examples of what you feel are fish intelligence. I could take you to a western river in the United States, Montana, I don't know where they do a lot of catch and release. And the actual people at the gafflers, the pock ranges have got good evidence that after hooking a fish eight times, it becomes virtually uncatchable because it knows what's going on.
It's not a butterfly, but is that instinct or smartness? Yeah. So just to ask, I'm working with scientists on this question of fish intelligence. Has your perspective in how you think about fish intelligence changed at all?
It's been fascinating for me to, I suppose, underpin the thoughts that we had, but instinctively had as anglers. We knew we were being protected. It's just nice to know what. I would draw an analogy to mythology, the old fashioned under the biological way of studying animal behaviour and Niko Timberg, who's one of the founding fathers, always said you must start with observation, and you must start with observation of an animal in its natural habitat.
And if you don't have that as your starting point, chances are you'll ask the wrong questions or design the wrong experiment. And I've always been a laboratory scientist and I'm not an editor, though I come from the family of actors and I don't do co-op wet improvisation. But I think there's a very good synergy between your lifetime observations, very precise observations of what fish do when you're trying to catch them. And then the question is...
I think it's changed dramatically. I hope that Marshall and me out here is that we've started in the act of conservation and making sure that our worlds are better, that we're putting fish back. But I think we're actually making life difficult for ourselves because by doing that we're actually creating a fish learning or an understanding process that something's wrong when we go out for them next time. So we're actually creating a rather vast experiment and learning to be better at what we do as a result because of those initial actions.
It's a curious whole thing. In Biscayne Bay, outside Miami, they have a tourist attraction where a top, you know, megalithic prehistoric fish are trained pretty much every day to come and eat live fish at the side of a bell. There's a bell or a side of a bell. Yeah, I've heard of those.
They come and these huge, those top and just for the tourists, I mean they drop these monstrous fish coming tickets. So these fish are trained to do that. In the local lakes where I live, we have this species called the Large Mass, which is a florist. The strange basket goes up to about 20 pounds top fish.
Those fish show up when the local Department of Fish and Wildlife are planting rainbow tracks into the lake and they plant trout about this size. And there's, yes, and these large mass will take that track completely. But more importantly, they seem to know when this truck is going to show up with this. It's vibrational, I say.
Every month or whatever. And this great swathe of fish is dumped in there, but they're waiting and they're not always there. They're there around about 10. How do they know?
Of course the anglers know that too. So there's a whole synergy going on there. Marshall, any fish farmer would tell you that if you go round and you feed your trout or you feed your fish in one direction. If you go anti-clockwise and you feed, then that's what they expect.
If you go vice versa and you go clockwise, you go, oh, really? What's that? It's a side-side thing. It's actually a 15-second memory.
Yeah, absolutely. That's a lot of nonsense. What is it? A 15-second memory.
No. It's not going to apply to me, but I don't know. It's almost impossible to go round and say, oh, I was published about fish come along. I've been pulling with no back from decades.
John, it's gone bad. I think it's amazing. Fish come along. And it's reported on today that today, the program would be a good thing.
It's such a bad press. I mean, it really has to be the PR for species. It's not fun. It's just a thing that is such a gap from people than the water water.
So we have a physical barrier that is the water. And so just that doesn't permit us to do is observation of fish. And lastly, it goes to the classroom from nature in general. This morning we were talking with the real charts saying that you grapple with your father bringing you to deliver for fishing.
And nowadays, maybe also, sometimes it's missing this part of bringing the children to next. I think it's even different tonight. I think with an animal, it's warm, bloodied, even peed up. There's a fish that's cold, it's scaly, you know, can be slimy.
The whole thing is very, very different. So it's different in the way we would probably view it. We don't see this woman cuddly and fuzzy. It's certainly not barracuda.
I think it's a lot of it in the mindset. What we don't necessarily like, we don't necessarily want to study. So with all of these misconceptions, how do we go about changing these perceptions that people have of unsmart fish? First things, these false dusting.
If you can go to the other side of the convilistin and people can have some more accurate information about the fish behavior and smartness. I certainly want to take this podcast into, I work in high school, I have a thing called fishing for schools which goes into schools with young people with only difficulties and rest of it. I found the one thing they all like to do is pretty much fish, strangely. I know it stands up, but that's what they like to do.
But from that has come to conservation. If you can engage with the young people, then you start to open their minds to the possibilities. That's all we can do is open people's minds to the possibilities. All we can do with teaching is open your mind.
I think the more honest and the more authoritative the science is behind fish, what they can and what they can't feel is all to the better of all of us. What are the big questions that you feel are left in this area? Obviously there's a lot of evidence that fish are intelligent, but are there still some big questions that are open-ended? They're hundreds of them.
One of the questions is when the Great Great Great Power comes in. There's quite good evidence that various other behavior patterns that we have, classites, smart. For example, intertidal fish that form a very precise mental map of their habitat and use that to escape if they're stranded at no time. They're very, very good at all aspects of spatial learning.
Slightly fish, they're slightly deeper. They're very closely related, same type of size, same type of diet, same type of life history. Don't need to do that because they're not at risk of being stranded. They're not very good at spatial learning.
Unfortunately, their full brain is about 20% small. Fish like cleaning a fish that have incredibly complicated relationships with the clients from which they pick off egg to parasites. It's a very, very complex inter-species competition. There's part of the brain called the dien-settelom, which is again about 20% to 30% bigger in obligate, cleaning species that have these complicated social interactions and closely related species that don't.
And where does the brain come? So these are actually fish that are able to recognize places. They don't use the same part of the brain during those places, as humans do, because they don't have it. They don't have any acortics.
They use the optic tectum. So does it make it less smart if they use different parts of the brain? I think variability in smartness and what it relates to, like whether you're a predator or prey. And then, I think, where brain power comes in, that's increasingly sort of comparative brain structure function in fishes in relation to the complexity of their behaviour.
And I'm sure that we'll know a lot more in five years time, both from what's the brain doing in all this, and about variability. And what makes some fish, I mean, Isaac Newton says, he praises carp as a smart fish, but is it roach? Or some other fish he says about it, stupid. So, and I'll get upset by it, roach.
There's stupid in some situation, you have to give them the right tests to see what they can learn. So I think variability in what fish do and how it relates, and then how the brain, those are the questions. Charles Scaven example, in other notes we were talking about it this morning, there's a Scottish term, gobsnett. He describes how there's a catch and take fisheries, the drug court and the take it out.
So you have, but some get, either they just put back on the escape. So you have a pool of experienced fish, who are still there, but the rest have gone. So then they put in some more, rainbow trout, a quinade, and haven't experienced this before. And it's kind of how, not just ones, but many times, he's seen these naive fish seeing a bait, they're fine.
They're going fast towards it, trying to take it, and the experience was pushing them. Yeah, literally, it would corral this out of the way, it does not knock it out of the way. And, you know, we got to surmise that, you know, that's visually what I could see. And if you've got an effect, if I suddenly loses effectiveness, you've got to assume that that's going on in an area that you can't see.
So you've got this fish following that doesn't perceive danger. And then you've got one that actually has had experience with that danger, and it will literally physically go up to the side of it, shepherd it away. And it's an amazing thing, it's a bit depressing, actually. But it does explain the lack of effectiveness of a fire over a certain type.
It was thought for a while that the released fish that's been corral is sending out some kind of... Yeah, they are, I mean, they're alerting the other as, you know, like, going to tell his friends. And it's still true today, that if you put in certain types of fish, you know, you've rained with a trout. But if they go in, you know, they'll be caught.
And those that aren't caught will learn from the process. There is some degree of learning there somewhere. So the topic of conservation has come up quite a lot through the discussions. And, Martina, you mentioned how that might have applications for the design of marine protected areas, for example.
Are there other examples that you've already been involved with or have thought about that you can see this research being applied to? There are already studies that are going on on farm fishing. So sometimes the fish that are farmed for the purpose of being released into the wild and for conservation. They are reared in conditions that are quite poor.
So I would like to link again to the navigating abilities of fish and the user landmarks. Sometimes these farm fish are reared in these very simple tanks from the early stage to when they are ready to be released. And this has been shown that can be detrimental for all the conservation management. Because these fish don't learn about the landmarks and what is actually the real natural environment.
They are exactly in an empty box of stuff. And so one of the areas really is the end of the wild. They can die very easily. They don't know how to do it.
It's completely different to the environment where they are in this moment in comparison to where they grew up. So these are part of, for example, the conservation about fish that they are already learned about and they are making more efficient. So these tanks are maybe providing some pebbles, some algae. And so they create also a bigger brain on fish.
Well, thank you so much to all of you for being part of the podcast today. It's been fascinating hearing all of the stories about fish intelligence and hopefully to our listeners that we've dispelled some of your misconceptions. And you have a different idea about how smart fish are. So thank you very much to all of you and thanks for listening to Naturally Speaking.
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