Fish may not be so stupid after all. They’re still stupid enough to continue nibbling on a hook even after their friends got yanked out of the water with one. But, according to researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, some wild fish, specifically the saddled and black seabream used in the study, can tell humans apart based on their clothing.
Publishing their findings in the scientific journal Biology Letters, the researchers trained wild seabream to follow a diver in the Mediterranean Sea for 12 days by offering the fish food and rewarding the ones that followed when the diver swam away from them.
That diver was then joined by another diver who was either wearing the same diving gear or differently-colored diving gear that firmly established them as a different entity. Regardless of which combination of those three options was paired together, both of the divers would swim in different directions and then loop back to where they began.
Fish Can Tell Humans Apart Based on Their Attire
They would do this over and over again. Both divers were armed with food but the fish would only receive a reward if they followed the specific researcher that had been feeding them.
After a while, the researchers found the fish were more likely to follow the diver who wore the distinctive outfit, especially as the trials progressed, suggesting they were learning to differentiate between the two divers.
When both divers wore identical outfits, the fish showed no preference between the two, suggesting to the researchers that the fish were relying on visual cues to tell the divers apart. Mind you, these are wild fish that had no prior human interaction yet they were able to employ simple pattern and color recognition to distinguish two humans from one another.
That suggests a higher level of cognitive processing than we previously thought they were capable of.
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