Name: What a Fish Knows
ISBN: 9780374288211

Jonathan Balcombe

An underwater exploration that overturns myths about fishes and reveals their complex lives, from tool use to social behavior

The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins

What a Fish Knows

Aileen Rese

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature." - Michael Faraday

"When people use the word 'intelligence' what they usually mean is 'being able to think the same way I do'." - Vladimir Dinets

"For almost every feat of learning displayed by a mammal or a bird, one can find a similar example in fished." - Stéphan Reebs

Culum Brown suggests that warsses in particular may be the fishes' answer to the primates among mammals and the corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, and jays) among birds in having a greater-than-expected number of examples of tool use.

Brain size be damned, if it's critical to a species' survival then that species will most likely be good at it.

Aquariums illustrate what science demonstrates: fishes have social lives. They swim together; they other individuals by sight, smell, voice and other sensory channels; they choose and they cooperate.

Natural selection acts in variation across individuals, and for complex creatures with minds and social lives, personality is an expression of that variation. You don't have to have fur or feathers to have personality; scales and fins will suffice.

Good heavens, might we also consider that client fishes may retaliate because they have evolved emotions, including one of the most basic: rage? In light of the evidence for emotions in fishes, I feel comfortable interpreting a client's retaliation for the brazen blenny's nip as an angry one.

We may wonder how an animal with culture feels to be removed from his treasured locale.

Culture is not coded in genes, so once lost it is unlikely to be regained. "If you restore the fish populations, it might not be enough," says Giancarlo de Luca, a biohpysicist with the study team. "They have essentially lost their group memory."

For me, the beauty of the grouper hunting collaboration is their conscious intentionality. It is two fish minds working in concert to translate and transfer desires and intentions into favorable outcomes.

Refouan Bshary and three colleagues described roving coral groupers from the Red Sea using a rapid, full-body shimmy to recruit giant moray eels to hunt with them. The two teammates swim off over the reed like friends on a stroll.

Like humans, fishes deploy a dizzying array of visual and behavioral deceptions to fool others. It isn't a big leap from "fish" to "selfish".

For some reason, reef living in particular has had a diversifying effect on sexual expression. More than one-quarter of all fishes on a reef can transition from male to female, or vice versa - with no need for expensive surgery.

All of this reveals a slight inaccuracy in the course of events in Finding Nemo. The fact is, upon Nemo's losing his mother, his dad, Marlin, should have become his new mother.

The ability of individual fishes to change sex shows just how fluid gender divisions can be in nature. If you are at all tuned in to societal trends, you'll know that gender lines are becoming more blurred in humans, too. [...] As medical advances expand our options to assert our true gender identities, we unwittingly become more like a fish.

Tierney Thys, a world expert on fishes, describes an encounter with a damselfish protecting an egg clutch. The five-inch fish grunted repeated warnings at Thys as she approached for a closer look. Failing to repel the giant diver, the damselfish darted in, "snatched up a large strand of my hair in its tiny teeth, and yanked backward... So hard, that I involuntarily yelped in pain, a cry that was immediately followed by spluttering as I flooded my mask laughing."

Pricklebacks, gunnels, and wolf eels coil their elongate bodies around their egg cluster as the tide recedes, trapping a small pool of water in which the eggs sit. It says something about the virtue of parental dedication that a fish will lie for many hours, exposed to air, to protect his of her future offspring.

Mouthbreeding makes [cardinal fishes] more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As ocean temperatures warm, these fish will need to breathe more - and the last thing they need is having a mouthful of offspring when they need oxygen.

"Anybody who thinks there can be limitless growth in a static, limited environment, is either mad or an economist." - Sir David Attenborough

Wahrscheinlich mein neues Lieblingsbuch! Ein völlig unerwartet tiefer Einblick in die Welt unserer Mitlebewesen. Wer hiernach noch Fische isst, schlägt auch zuhause seine Frau!

What a Fish Knows The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins

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