An experiment conducted in Corsica has shown that some fish know how to recognize individual human individuals and deliberately ignore others.
The researchers from the Station Research Station in Corsica have a problem: every year they organize study campaigns on the field (or rather underwater) to investigate the behavior of local fish. The problem is that the fish that populate these waters are “thieves”, and follow scientists to steal the food otherwise destined to become a reward to use during the experiments.
The curious detail is that Pisces seem to recognize humans who bring the delicacies, and follow them ignoring their colleagues. Is it possible that this is the case? A study published on Biology Letters suggests that yes, Fish are able to recognize individual humans.
Marine training. So far, very few experiments have been held relating to the ability of fish to recognize us: the archers fish have shown this ability in laboratory contexts, but nobody had yet tested it in nature. The fish of the race station (Gets and tanute, two species species of sausage and jarables) They proved to be the perfect champion, because they live in the wild but are now used to human presence.
The experiment took place in two phases: in the first, a single researcher dived into water full of food, attracting the attention of the fish. Dive after diving, he began to remove a series of distinctive signs (for example a heated Red Sub) and to “reward” the fish only if they followed it for at least 50 meters of swimming, up to get them used to the idea that its presence was equivalent to a prize in food.
The experiment. After that, the researcher began to dive into the company of another human: the couple swam in two opposite directions, and at the beginning the fish proved confused – which of the two follows? After a couple of “tests”, in which they understood which of the two humans to bring food with them, The fish began to choose decisively to follow the first researcherignoring the second, demonstrating that they knew where food was.
Further confirmation came when the two humans dived with Identical submates: At that point the fish have not been able to distinguish from each other, and they started again to follow them both. In short: the fish (at least those studied in Corsica) They know who we are, and recognize us based on visual clues who tell them what the interesting human is and what is swimming with empty -handed hands, and therefore it is useless …
