Humans are often guilty of anthropocentrism (the world revolves around them and animals are incidental to their lives). I feel that the vast majority of people really don’t give enough respect to the brain power of animals and their sentience which in the wrong person facilitates abuse. It is what facilitates sport hunting.
And this attitude often leads to underestimating the efficiency of their memory. Fish are a good example which is partly why I have highlighted the memory of fish in this infographic. We tend to regard fish almost as inanimate objects, non-sentient, almost non-living.
Ask a commercial fisherman if what they were doing was cruel and they’d probably laugh at you and be bemused. There is just a huge hole in people’s knowledge of the sentience of animals including the much-persecuted fish and other marine wildlife. Each year, 1.1 to 2.2 trillion individual wild fish are caught globally. Their lives snuffed out through asphyxiation. A painful death is we are honest. A trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 by the way.
Don’t underestimate a fish’s memory by Michael BroadRELATED: Cats Have A Good Long-term Memory
The information in the Infographic above comes from various sources and I will tell you about those sources here because there is not enough space in the Infographic.
Professor Culum Brown, a biologist from Macquarie University in Sydney believes that fish are often underestimated when it comes to their cognitive prowess. He believes that people underestimate a goldfish’s memory and that the goldfish is a paradigm model of other fish.
The experiment about the rainbow fish mentioned in the Infographic was carried out by Brown. In a tank, he swept a net towards them. The fish learnt quickly to head for the only escape route which was a hole in the center of the net large enough for them to pass through. And they remembered this escape route 11 months later which is about equivalent to half their lives.
Most people know about salmon thankfully. They hatch in freshwater streams and then travel out to sea. They may swim hundreds of miles to reach their feeding grounds. Years later they will return to the river where they hatched hundreds of miles away.
And goldfish, in one test conducted at the University of Oxford (2022) showed that they could measure distance by using markers, in this case black-and-white stripes affixed to the side of the tank. The stripes were widened or narrowed. The goldfish travelled further or less far in response to the width of the stripes. When the stripes were narrower, they swam a shorter distance. It appears that they were using the stripes as markers. This indicates, to me, that fish use markers in the natural environment to guide them and to help measure distances. They probably use these markers to navigate as well.
RELATED: Working memory in domestic cats to position hind legs
My thanks to The Times newspaper.
Forgive me for writing about animals other than cats. I have simply run out of things to say about cats.
