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Goldfish Smarter Than Dolphins
flergum writes "While dolphins may have big brains, laboratory rats and goldfish can outwit them. It appears that the large brains are a function of their environment rather than intelligence. From the article: 'Dolphins have a superabundance of glia and very few neurons... The dolphin's brain is not made for information processing it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water.' I guess this means that the Navy will start recruiting and training goldfish for those mine search and destroy missions."
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My goldfish certainly display this behaviour, and it is not just the Pavlovian response to someone walking near the tank.
My three fish will swim to the end of the tank I am sat nearest to and badger me into feeding them, but only when the light in the tank is on.
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Well, Paul Manger is a real scientist who's published 50 articles, most if not all in neuroscience areas, some with pretty high numbers of citations, and quite a few of those articles are on cetaceans. The article that the story is based upon was published in Biological Reviews, which has an impact factor of 6 - it's clearly not a tin-pot cruddy journal which publishes any old crap. (and while IFs aren't as good a guide to a journal's credibility as our esteemed granting bodies would like us to believe, they do give some measure of an article's worth)
The news story, although bizarely linked to Aljazeera (!), is attributed to Reuters down the bottom. So it's not quite as "pure crap" as you might think - the odd comments about dolphins not jumping over nets are probably more a result of the journalist trying to make a snappy story out of it all, rather than being the sole basis of Paul Manger's research!
It seems you simply don't understand what "memory" means in the technical sense. "Memory" is not required for learning, training, or routines.
Mythbusters... They trained some goldfish to navigate a labyrinth.
Though I think part of the confusion here is, that I always thought goldfish had 3 seconds of short term memory. A short short-term memory does not exclude the ability to learn specific behavior, what learned can just not be constructed from facts with many seconds in between.
My boyfriend suffered a stroke which crippled his short-term memory. For example, one time when I was talking to Andy on the phone, he was distracted by something and put the phone down, and I had to yell to get his attention and remind him that I was still on the line. "Hi there! What's up?" Nonetheless, his therapists succeeded in teaching him some adaptive behaviors, and could still learn some new information with a lot of repetition (what year it is, where I was going to school, the fact that I'd moved). Furthermore, there are some kinds of learning which don't depend upon short-term memory; someone with no short-term memory may not remember why he avoids the place where he burned his hand on a hot pan, or why he prefers to be around one person but not another... but he does. For a good demonstration of short-term-memory deficiency, see "Finding Nemo"; Dory is a remarkably good example. I even used the "P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney" method (asking him to repeat it over and over) to get Andy to remember the name of the restaurant where we'd had dinner.
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