So, fish these days, always getting smarter, biologists from Stanford university recently focussed on male African cichlid fish, claiming that there's a lot more going on than we think. Researcher Julie Desjardins and biology professor Russell Fernald arranged sparring sessions for the fish, analysing the brain after each session, hoping to find a higher level of sophistication behind these tiny beings. Julie Desjardins claims that "In normal fights, they bite at each other, one after the other, and will do all kinds of movements and posturing, but it is always slightly off or even alternating in timing," so there is some thinking behind the fighting pattern of these fish, and when fighting a mirrored opponent (itself), "your opponent is perfectly in time. So the subject fish really is not seeing any sort of reciprocal response from their opponent." Now I've always been a fan of certain sports like boxing and ultimate fighting, but doesn't fish sparring seem a little... shall we say pointless? Not according to the two researchers, who after analysing the brains of two fish, one fighting an actual opponent, the other fighting a mirror reflection both showed similar amounts of aggression, though the major difference was that in the brain of the fish fighting its reflection, a substantially higher level of fear was found than in the fish fighting an actual opponent. Now apparently, these investigations show a higher level of thinking in fish than we thought, if you think about it, however, doesn't it seem like these fish don't think as much as we believe, seriously, who gets more scared of their reflection than a real opponent? Smart fish apparently.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/05/21/fish-fear-scared-reflection-mirro.html
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