A Goldfish's(and other fishes')Memory

A Goldfish's(and other fishes')Memory

Maggie Oimoen

            You've probably heard the story that . . . You've probably heard the story that goldfish only have a memory span of about three seconds. Now if you were a goldfish, you shouldn't have noticed I started over, right? Not exactly. The thought of them having a memory longer than that may start to make their life in small fish bowl seem less bearable. There may be more to their "little" fish brains then you thought. 

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         The ability for goldfish to learn the difference between classical music types was studied looking at Bach and Stravinsky in particular. Kazutaka Shinozuka and other researchers at Keio University in Tokyo trained eight goldfish to distinguish between the two composers. There were four fish that were trained to bite a red bead for Bach and a four were trained to bite it for Stravinsky. After 100 training sessions, the goldfish were able to identify to their type of music 75% of the time. "We can conclude that goldfish discriminate between Bach's and Stravinsky's music," Kazutaka Shinozuka said. "Of course music is artificial stimuli made by humans, so music itself does not have specific meaning for goldfish. But music consists of complex acoustic features. Ability to discriminate such complex auditory stimuli might be beneficial for fish in an evolutionary sense." 

          Most of the abilities the fish posses when it comes to memory can benefit them in an evolutionary sense. There is a reason they posses the ability in the first place and as Shinozuka says discriminating between different sounds can be a helpful tool for the fish. This goes the same for other animals as well. 

"Do Goldfish Really Have a 3 Second Memory?" by Animalist

  An article, written by Raziye Akkoc, talks about research done at MacEwan University on African Cichlids where they where trained to remember to enter a certain area of their aquarium. When they entered that area, the fish were then fed. Because the fish knew which area to go to, their capability to perform advanced memory tasks was assumed. Now this study was when they were just recently trained. But even after 12 days of no training and no performing the task, the fish still remembered where to go when they wanted the reward of food. The benefit of remembering where food is supplied has an obvious evolutionary advantage, and now more research is being done looking at fish memories and the effect the environment and drugs was on it. 

"Are You More Forgetful than a Fish?" by: AsapSCIENCE

                   Face discrimination is another level of memory that we seem to associate with more "intelligent" animals. There is actual research done that shows that archerfish have the ability to discriminate between human faces. They're known for the ability to knock down aerial prey by powerful jets of water they propel which relies on vision to see the prey. There vision is advanced to allow for this type of hunt. 

            In one of the two experiments, four archerfishes were trained to tell between two human faces. They spit their jet at the face that was conditioned for the food reward. They were also conditioned to avoid a face and then later were shown different faces and the face to avoid in the hope that they would choose the new, random face. This showed the fishes ability to distinguish between faces. In the end of the experiment, Cait Newport, the lead researcher, found that the fish were able to discriminate the trained face from 44 randomly presented ones. 

Archerfish by Tropical Fish Keeping

              Fish are creatures that don't get enough credit for the abilities that they posses from being able to remember things over a week to telling between faces. There is more to simpler animals than we think and hopefully this opens your mind. Also this should get rid of the idea that goldfish only remember up to three seconds cause they can remember so much more. 

References: 

Akkoc, R. (2014, July 01). Memory of a goldfish? Actually fish can recall events 12 days ago.

        Retrieved September 23, 2017, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10937888/Memory-of-a-goldfish-Actually-fish-  can-recall events-12-days-ago.html

Newport, C., Wallis, G., Reshitnyk, Y., & Siebeck, U. E. (2016). Discrimination of human faces by archerfish (Toxotes chatareus). Scientific Reports, 6(1).doi:10.1038/srep27523

Shinozuka, K., Ono, H., & Watanabe, S. (2013). Reinforcing and discriminative stimulus properties of music in goldfish. Behavioural Processes, 99, 26-33doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2013.06.009