Fish can identify themselves in photos, a new study finds. Here’s why that matters.
, Kohda’s team exposed wild-caught cleaner fish in separate tanks to mirrors for a week. The researchers then injected brown dye just beneath the scales on the fish’s throats, making a mark that resembles the parasites these fish eat off the skin of larger fish in the wild. When the marked fish saw themselves in a mirror, they began striking their throats on rocks or sand in the bottom of the tank, apparently trying to scrape off the marks.
In the new study, 10 fish that passed the mirror test were then shown a photo of their own face and a photo of an unfamiliar cleaner fish face. All the fish acted aggressively toward the unfamiliar photo, as if it were a stranger, but were not aggressive toward the photo of their own face. When another eight fish that had spent a week with a mirror but had not previously been marked were shown a photo of their own face with a brown mark on the throat, six of them began scraping their throats just like the fish that passed the mirror test. But they did not scrape when shown a photo of another fish with a mark.
“I think it’s a great next step,” says comparative cognitive psychologist Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., who wasn’t involved in the study. But she would like to see more research before drawing conclusions about what’s being represented in the mind of a nonverbal being like a fish. “As with most other studies, it still leaves some room for further follow-up.”
Kohda’s lab has more experiments planned to continue to probe what’s going on in the brain of the cleaner fish, and to try the new photo-recognition method on another popular research fish, the three-spined stickleback (, is already convinced, describing the new study as “robust and quite brilliant.” People shouldn’t be surprised that fish could be self-aware given that they have already been shown to have complex behavior including tool use, planning and collaboration, Balcombe says.
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