Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

so how smart are goldfish? my friend told me that gold fish only have a 5 second memory, and i have herd this but when ever i go by my tank all the fish come to the top and almost beg to eat. now when my gf walks by the tank she dosn;'t get the same reaction. so do they must have a memory and some how know the difference between people who go by the tank. dose anyone else have some imput for this

mine remeber me too.

Fish do recognize the difference between givers of food (beg), and non-givers of food (ignore), and children who move in scary ways (dive for cover). They will remember this from day to day, and over the long cold winter while sleeping under the ice. I can observe this in my own tanks and pond. Five seconds...well, humans have a short term memory too--good for about five seconds. Just enough to dial that phone number. I'm sure fish also have a short term memory, but they have at least some long-term memory, too.

Questions to ponder: If fish have only 5-second memories, how do salmon remember which river they were spawned in and how to get back? And how do mated fish remember which fish they are mated to if they are separated for more than 5 seconds? (Let me assure you, they know!!) I'm sure there are more examples, given a bit of time to think.

For those of you that may not have seen it ......

On the subject of training fish, check out these trained goldfish, it's a short movie, about 2.5MB.

http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/pics/ ... ldfish.wmv

Damn funny...

Wanderer butterflies apparently return to their original 'spawning grounds' - after migrating for a span of several generations! I'm sure there examples like that for fish too.

I don't know where memory becomes something else.

i have a feeling animals have a way to pick up on vibes given out by other animals. this gives them an an ability to "read" their environment instinctively. some animals are more tuned into reading the vibes as it has been an essential tool for their survival. i think this would be the case with fish due to their environment. i think humans could once feel the vibes but through the development of an ego lost most of the ability. whether this makes fish smart in a human sense, i guess that would come down to what we define smart as. personally i think fish know a lot more then they let on.

sorry about the ramble.

can't remember if the discussion was in this forum or another, but the video is a hoax, anyone who has seen a fantail or simmilar rounded fish swim and compares the swimming tecnique to that in the video will notice that when they are really swimming their whole body wiggles (swim in an s sort of path rather than such a straight line...)

spew. Altho myth busters also did one not as trained, but they still navigated obstacles quicker than the control group.

I think there was a catalyst apisode on training fish, in regards to releasing them back into the wild to replace the plder fish that have been taken by fisherman. Apparently the older fish pass on some tricks for survival t the younger ones but when they are fished out the tricks dry up the the younger fish are less likely to survive.

I like the episodes like that one where They are competing against each other

I saw that one, i use a simmilar principle with my guppy fry. First lot of fry prob 8 ish months ago where really hard to get feeding, but once i did, i left a few weaned fish in with my next lot of fry which "learnt" from the others and ate the food straight away

also saw on some tv show (possibly catalyst or maybe landline or something else) where they were playing videos of predator fish eating fish to the fish to be restocked with

Hey, Daniel, when u say that the movie was a hoax... what do you think they did to make the fish move like that?

CC, the implication is that images of fish were digitally created by someone who doesn't understand how fish swim.

ooohhhh!!! XD

wow the amazing things you can do with technology!



Edited to add a word, my keyboard needs new batteries

Yeah thats where majority of the discussion was, we all agreed that a fish like that couldn't propel itself with small flicks of its pectoral fins.....

as to how not sure but the two most popular theories were;
like JP said digital manipulation
and another popular theory was by using magnets, eg a small powerful one inside each fish with a larger one under the tank pulling them along

Hehe, hope they didn't stick the magnets inside the living fish LOL.