New research shows that the fish have the reasoning capacity of a 4- to -5-year-old child when it comes to figuring out which of its peers is "top dog."
Stanford University scientists made the discovery — said to be the first demonstration that fish can use logical reasoning to figure out their social pecking order — by studying fights among small, highly territorial, spiny-finned fish called cichlids, common in freshwater in tropical Africa, including in Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.
This type of reasoning, called transitive inference (TI), is a developmental milestone for human children, showing up nonverbally as early as ages 4 and 5; it also has been reported in monkeys, rats and birds. It allows thinkers to reason that if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is also bigger than C.
Male cichlids (Astatotilapia burtoni) regularly fight aggressively to establish real estate from a pool of limited territory, to secure control of scarce food resources and to maintain a location for spawning with females.
The ability to know in advance with which peer they could pick and win a fight is an advantage for these fish, Fernald said. To learn about fish learning, Grosenick designed experiments that staged dozens of fights across 11 days among five different fish (known to the scientists as A, B, C, D, and E, with A being the strongest and E the weakest) in a circle of transparent, plastic tanks that allowed a “bystander” fish in a center tank to observe each fight as it took place. A fought B, B fought C and so on.
Later on in an open tank, the bystander got to choose between whether to hang out with either the A fish or the E fish, even though the bystander never saw A fight E. The bystander also was tested to choose between the B fish and the D fish, which had never faced off.
Bystander fish in experiments typically chose the weakest fish—either D or E (those that had lost the most fights)—as their preferred companion, making the safest choice for their long-term survival and ability to reproduce. This preference shows, the team writes in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature, that the fish used observation and logical reasoning to infer or deduce the relative ranking among the five fighting fish.
Source: MSNBC
Though the researchers most likely covered all the bases, I am curious about a couple of things.
(1) Were the strongest fish also the biggest? This is important because the "bystander" probably was gravitating towards the smaller fish, irrespective of their fighting capability. May be the "bystander" went to the smaller fish due to their size, and not because they were losers?
(2) Could this behavior be due to genetic programming (at least in part), and not entirely a learned response? I don't know if deer are programmed to flee when they sense a hungry lion. If they are raised amidst a pride, would they attempt to hunt other deer along with their lion friends (and behave like Mowgli in The Jungle Book)?
Sure, we see cats and dogs getting along well if they are properly exposed to each other. I wonder if genetic programming cautions a Goldfish that it is not advisable to fight African Cichlids. Is it possible that the "bystander" instinctively knew which type of fish to hang out with, and the response had nothing to do with learning?
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. - Robert Frost
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