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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."
...but don't goldfish only have a 3 second memory?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
And thank us for all the fish? Surely goldfish don't eat themselves.
I doubt it. I think this is just exactly what the dolphins want us to think. Perhaps they are hoping that we'll leave them alone if we think they're all idiots and they can get back to the heavy schedule of light swimming and intricate whistling they had planned.
.. er.... wait.. a dolphin just called me and asked how long I could hold my breath. I think this worries me...
Well I'm on to you, dolphins! I'm putting the word out! I know you're smarter than goldfish and
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Is a person that can figure out how to train an animal with a 3 second attention span:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bt6K521o3Y
FTA: "If you don't put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in,"
Truly an astounding display of cognition.
So long, and thanks for all the flakes
Summation 2
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28315
So as you can see, Douglas Adams was right all along!Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
"You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it. If you don't put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in," he said. "But a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks, the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water between the different pools," he said. Manger says the thought to jump over would simply not cross their unsophisticated minds.
So because the dolphin isn't brainless enough to jump out of its tank and beach itself and die in the process, that makes them stupid? I suppose by comparison the child that plays away from road isn't as smart as the kid that plays in traffic, you know, the one that's seeking to "enlarge his environment" by becoming road pizza.
I am reminded of the counter argument which noted that the enlarged part observed in Einstein's brain was due to the extra glia cells needed to support the higher activity of the same number of neurons.
I've also dived with many varieties of fish, but our interaction with dolphins off Tiputa Pass and Trousers Point (you can find both easily on Google) was qualitatively different from any with fish.
It basically sounds like Japanese propaganda to me. Might be time to make that donation to Sea Shepherd.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I'm not anything close to the people who think dolphins are really really intelligent (though Douglas Adams makes a pretty good case), but IRTFA and I can not see how this is a serious article.
It ends: "Manger also points to the tuna industry, which under consumer pressure has gone to great lengths to prevent dolphins from being caught and killed by accident in nets.
"If they were really intelligent, they would just jump over the net because it doesn't come out of the water," he said."
Umm, yea, they would if they ware smart? *sigh* - how did this make *any* news at all. Even assuming that the gist of the article is true (about the different types of brain material) the rest is crap - was it "peer reviewed" (as the article points out) by other idiots? Maybe it is all a Rovian plot to discredit Aljazeera.net? I can not take the article and it's contents with any real sense of belief - it is so idiotic that I can not trust the rest of it. That's not to say they are incorrect - just that this individual article is is pure crap and one should not use it to base any belief on.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
A fly has pretty much a hard-wired brain, but it is highly effective at finding food and keeping it alive.
Some while ago, some researchers managed to get a dish of 1500 (or 15000??) rat brain cells to fly a 747 simulator -- including handling complex actions like landing with wind shear. I bet it took less time to train the rat brain than it takes for a human to attend flight school. I guess a rat brain in a pilot's uniform doesn't pick up as much skirt though.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I for one welcome our new Goldfish Overlords
. o o O ( Where are all the giant-brained goldfish? )
I'd take an octopus any day of the week! Not only are they excellent problem solvers, they give good massages.
You can count the number of neurons vs glia all day long, but at the end of the day dolphins seem to have MUCH better results than goldfish. Just because a certain feature normally has a certain result doesn't mean you can rewrite reality when it doesn't!
If the word "intelligence" was defined as a certain ratio of neurons to glia, he'd have a point. Of course, "intelligence" wouldn't matter so much, because it would only matter in certain situations. Much like "clock speed".
I also don't see how the "jumping out of the bowl/over the net" even deserves a mention...unless we now have a way of interviewing dolphins and goldfish.
Nature (evolution) tends to take the most efficient solution -- natural selection will favour the animals that don't need to expend so much energy to achieve the same result.
What are these tasks? One task is locating anti-ship mines like those found in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War. Another task is identifying unauthorized swimmers (likes Islamic terrorists) seeking to enter a harbor where naval warships are anchored.
I highly doubt that a goldfish can perform these tasks.
I, for one, defy our would-be dolphin overlords!
In future news two sequels to Finding Nemo will come out "Recruiting Nemo" and "Training Nemo".
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
While it is obvious and quite dated knowledge that the sheer size of a brain is no indicator for "intelligence" (let us avoid the discussion what intelligence is in the first place for the moment), it is provably wrong that dolphins just do what they are "conditioned" to do. There have been many experiments that show that dolphins are capable to do a lot more than just demonstrate conditioned reflexes, including understand a several-word sign language and coming up with what could be called creative solutions.
Nothing of that sort has been demonstrated for goldfish yet, but that does not mean it cannot be done, just that we simply do not know yet.
It has been shown for other species that they show surprisingly intelligent behaviour when trained and it is probably impossible to defined what "more intelligent" should mean for non-humans (it is already quite arbitrarily defined for humans). So the bottom line is - more animals are more intelligent than most people think. And dolphins have shown a quite surprising range of abilities that was not observed in any other marine animal yet.
#23: Delude humans. Check.
:-)
You guys have obviously already forgotten about the mice then?
= Ch =
Insert
So goldfish are able to jump out of their bowls... but what we really need to know in order to sort this out is can they run Linux?
1. Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans). This is related to their extremely complex social structures, which implies high intelligence. And this is just one area in which dolphins seem to show high intelligence.
2. Glia are no longer considered 'noncomputational' by neuroscientists. Recent research seems to show that glia, and not just neurons, may perform computational tasks. This is highly controversial at present, but we are far from being able to say that just because an animal has lots of glia that that does not indicate a potential for high brain functions.
People dumber than fish have been known to become presidents....
eTrade SUCKS
Dolphins get trapped in nets because they can't detect them, not because they're too stupid to know what to do. Aside from the obvious fact, as someone else has already pointed out, that a goldfish that jumps out of it's bowl and dies isn't nessearily very smart, there are could also be complex psychological factors at play as to why dolphins might not attempt to escape.
Dolphins are one of the few creatures that play games, such as playing tag with a peice of seaweed, or blowing bubble rings. This type of behaviour is often an indicator of high intelligence. To say that a Dolphin isn't much smarter than a Goldfish is an insult to both Dolphins and any human with half a brain to realise this article is a crock.
I disagree that jumping out of ones environment is a smart move, especially if you don't know what's on the other side. I disagree that dolphins are dumb because they get caught in nets because: a) how do you jump over a net if you find your self in the absolute center? b) maybe most do 'just jump over' and the ones caught are the dumb few. c) if a dolphin doesn't jump over a net it will become sushi, a dolphin probably doesn't know that it should jump over a net unless it knows it's dangerous, if a dolphin knows the net is dangerous - it's probably already been caught (see sushi statement). d) nets (i think) are designed to be fairly invisible, dolphins aren't known for having excellent eyesight and I don't know if their echo location is good enough to spot a net... Let's have a fish off and stick a dolphin and a goldfish in a tank and see who wins... actually to make it fair lets stick quite a few goldfish in there...
Clearly it was a slow news weekend. This report got a ton of coverage, which seems unwarranted given some of the abitrary standards of "intelligence" put forward by the researchers. The Wikipedia article on dolphin intelligence provides a far better balanced view of the subject.
I had a quick look at the University of the Witwatersrand website. Dr. Manger is a lecturer at the School of Anatomical Sciences. He is not an animal behaviorologist.
While Dr. Manger is no doubt qualified to discuss the structure of a dolphin's brain, he is in no better qualified to draw conclusions about dolphin intelligence than any of us here on Slashdot. Perhaps this explains some of his eccentric statements, or why his opinions contrast so sharply with other research indicating a high level of social complexity in dolphin behavior.
That Dr. Manger's study is "peer-reviewed" is really neither here or nor there, since peer review usually occurs within an author's specialty and Manger's most controversial findings transcend his field.
Dr. Manger's comment that dolphins should be smart enough to jump out of tuna nets would seem simply bizzare if they weren't so outright callous.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
The only comparable goldfish dish is too much like Whitebait.
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Glial cells apparently aren't really just placeholders and heaters. Scientific American ran a really good article a while back called "Did Scientists Miss Half the Brain?". (There is what appears to be a summary at this location.) It details a modern understanding of brain structure, which has overturned the former conception of glial cells as "just" structural elements supporting neurons. It would seem that glial cells can both sense and emit neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters can affect the operation of neurons. So linked to the electrochemical network we usually think of as the brain is another purely chemical one as well.
Also, even in humans, there is a "superabundance" of glial cells, in that there are approximately 10 glial cells for every neuron.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
What is really disturbing about this story is not how wrong it is, but how it spread like wildfire through the echo chamber that is the web pages of the "respectable" news media. There seems to be zero interest in vetting stories anymore. Anything that sounds like a sensation and be linked to some other news page somewhere, is worth publishing, without a critical word added.
Back on topic, did you know that as far as we know, only three animals understand the concept of 'pointing at something'? These three are humans, chimpanzees and dolphins. Try it with your cat or dog. It will continue to look at your hand, not where you want it look, until the cows come home. Understanding symbols that stand for vectors in space require a greal deal of abstract thinking.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050606_dolp hinfrm.htm
A group of dolphins has learned to use tools, with mothers teaching their daughters how to do so. That's pretty damn smart.
Just goes to show that you shouldn't take every slashdotted article for its face value.
Sinking Titanic, Goldfish Memory, Trombone Explosion. Episode Number: 11 Season Num: 1M. Adam and Jamie had to train their goldfish to do race.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Oh come on, you can't possibly believe this bullshit.
He's a dolphin, he'll believe whatever the govt tells him.
Now, if he were a goldfish ...
Bart and Lisa are doing some recycling of those plastic ring things that hold six-packs of beer together.
Lisa: And, you have to cut these up first. Otherwise, animals get caught in them.
Bart: Only the stupid ones.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That short term memory theory? Definately not true. It's a false theory used as justification for keeping goldfish in a bowl, which is in reality cruel. Goldfish raised in a stimulating environment can be quite intelligent, being able to be trained such things as playing basketball (can not find source right now) soccer, and sometimes even synchronized swimming (Goldfish are not naturally schooling fish per say, so this behavior is definately trained.) And... umm... Texas Holdem. I'm not quite sure about the validity of that last one, though. Actually, I've got a pretty good idea about exactly how valid that one is, but I'm leaving it in anyways.
I'd have to see a lot more evidence to actually believe that goldfish are as smart as dolphins. Although in designing intelligence tests, we do have to be extremely careful to not confuse "behaviors and thought patterns that are closer to ours" with more intelligent. Researchers already have a difficult time establishing IQ tests that don't show significant bias for particular races or cultures of people, much moreso across different species.
Also, just saying that because the dolphin nervous system has a higher percentage of glial cells they are by necessity less intelligent really shows a misunderstanding of the nervous system. Nerurons are quicker and better at actually processing information, but glial cells can also pass nervous impulses, and in fact are better at passing impulses over a long distance than neurons, and as such are better for coordinating information from multiple regions of the brain than neurons are. The larger proportion of glial cells could simply be a result of needing to work with more pieces of information related to movement as a result of living in a 3d world rather than a primarilly 2d world as humans do (Both due to dolphin's ability to move in 3d, and their reliance on echolocation for ranging which gives much finer distance measurements and allows for the creation of a much more accurate mental map of the environment, as opposed to human vision which in in reality formed by a roughly 2d image projected on our retinas which we strive to pull some 3d information out of.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
They have shown that dolphins have pattern recognition, the ability to learn and to anticipate the next part of a sequence. Dolphins have a language in which they commnicate with others of thier species. They have complex social structures. They can solve puzzles, they can be trained to do complex tasks.
I'm not saying that they're as smart as me, but they are at least as smart as other higher order animals, and certainly smarter than my goldfish who keeps trying to commit suicide.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Just to add on. I remember watching this in the Discovery Channel. Most people assumed that the dolphins are intelligent and friendly such that when boats sail in the ocean, they swim alongside the boat or even in front of the boat just to mingle with their human friends. However, this was not the *real* reason. Apparently, they noticed that there are a bunch of smaller, baby dolphins swimming in the opposite direction away from the boat, while those that mingle with the humans are the adult dolphins. This can be seen that the adults are distracting the humans while their youngs can swim off to a safer place. Such altruistic behaviour is hard to find in the aquatic world.
w00t
This has got to be some of the worst logic ever. For one, the goldfish would die, that doesn't make it smart, it makes it stupid.
And for dolpins not to escape, could be argued that they're smart enough to know they have an easy life where they are in the fully staffed spa of luxury. Who'd want to leave?
I think from the article, that Dolphins are even more intelligent than the so called scientist that came up with this theory.
On a side note, anyone find it odd that this is report in Aljazeera?
Carp (eg goldfish) live in an environment in which jumping from one body of water to another offers a real chance of accessing a new environment, e.g. a new pond or stream. It also offers the ONLY chance of survival for carp trapped in small, evaporating puddles of water, which may well be how goldfish register their surroundings.
By contrast, a dolphin has only a fairly low chance of being able to jump into a whole new ocean. A zero chance, in fact.
Therefore, the tendency to jump may be more a reflection of the chance that jumping will do a given creature any good, rather than a sign of intelligence.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
First of all: goldfish are not two inch long fish you keep in a half gallon glass bowl. Those are baby fish that are fated to die drinking their own piss. Goldfish are properly pond fish like koi. They aren't nearly as big as koi, but when full grown they can be over a foot long and quite active and beefy. I have a 55 gallon tank, and if I were to stock it with goldfish, there would only be room for one, maybe two with considerable effort and skill applied.
Keeping mature goldfish is reputed to be like keeping dogs -- the fish recognize individuals and respond to them.
Goldfish, like koi, are carp, which are members of the Cyprinid family of fishes. Cyprinids include many species that are well known in the aquarium hobby: danios, rasboras, barbs etc. Many of these species are popular because they are active and considered highly intelligent.
I cycled my tank (established a colony of beneficial waste recycling bacteria) using a school of White Clouds, a cyprinid minnow about an inch long and closely related to rasboras. White clouds are attractive,active, peaceful little fish that are extremely hardy and good for this purpose (incidentally a much better candidate for "goldfish bowls" than goldfish, provided you're committed to daily water changes). They are also astonishingly intelligent.
My White Cloud school mostly patrolled the top third of my tank, snatching food from the surface or as it sank slowly. After several months, I introduced a pair of Corydoras -- a tiny armored cat fish -- to the the tank. Catfish of course are bottom feeders, and are constantly foraging in the gravel. When my White Clouds saw this, they started foraging in the gravel too. Their mouths point upward for snatching food from the surface, so they have to turn over on their backs to do it.
Clearly, this is not "instinctive" behavior. They saw and learned. With a brain that I doubt amounts to more than a cubic millimeter in volume.
The behavior of these fish are interesting; you need to keep a largish school to see the full range. Somewhere around eight or nine fish, suddenly you see a completely different set of behaviors emerge. Clearly they are intelligent fish despite their tiny size, but much of that intelligence comes out when there are enough fish for them to feel comfortable and confident.
Later I introduced some Danios to the tank, which changed the schooling behavior of the White Clouds. Danios, who are supposedly relatively peaceful and playful, have strong hierarchies in which the strongest fish (usually the most irridescent) claim territories. The "playful" behavior, if you watch closely, consists of the strongest fish chasing the next strongest fish out of his territory, and so on down the line. White Clouds aren't hierarchical, but they apparently look enough like danios to get chased. In my tank, the strongest danio cruised a territory consisting the top half foot of water and about 1/3 the surface area of the tank. So the White Clouds started lurking as individuals or groups of two or three in out of the way places. After adding another pair of white clouds, the behavior of the school changed. A pair of the more robust White Clouds who had previously been lurking far from the aggressive danio began patrolling the edge of the his territory. When a weaker white cloud strayed into the danio's territory and the danio attacked, they'd dart in to nip at his flanks. After a few days of this the danio's territory shrunk so that the White Clouds could school like they used to.
Instinctive behavior? In this case, certainly. The point is that these fish have evolved to school in hostile environments; evolution provided them with highly capable brains for the task of survival, depsite their small size. Furthermore, schooling is more than just huddling together to reduce the risk of predation to an individual in the school, these fish have social behaviors that strengthen the school. This means that there are signals, and coordination, and a
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I read an article in Scientific American about how dolphins play with each other or by themselves when they're bored. Older dolphins will teach younger ones how to generate complex vorticies in the water, and then inject them with air, making these weird stable rings that they can fool around with. I just googled for the info, and this story popped up. My goldfish are pretty clever for such little animals, I guess, but they certainly don't play like this.
Moreover, the hunting patterns of dolphins are considerably more complex and 'intelligent-looking' than those of goldfish. Dolphins are more social, sure, but it takes more than a bunch of friendly animals to realize that they can use fishing nets to hunt.
Brain size and composition have ALWAYS been a bad indicator of intelligence. If it were the case merely that a big brain was enough to be smart, we'd be badly outclassed. From human to human, we'd see fair differences in intelligence, just based on the size of the brain (assuming that most human brains are composed similarly, and by increasing size, we merely increase the number of cells making up that brain -- tell me if that assumption is terribly off). Obviously this isn't true.
Fact of the situation: we're REALLY bad at figuring out what makes intelligence and what makes the brain work at all. I don't buy that goldfish are smarter yet. One study or group of studies is insufficient to make me believe this in the face of the observable evidence of intelligence or lack thereof.
You may as well post an article about how scientists have discovered life on the moon and use the Weekly World News as a source.
CNN and FOX News are any better?
Come on. ALL major news sources are propaganda outlets. That's how it works. The problem only arises when people think that their own country's news agency are above corruption.
As for the article, I'm sure the guy interviewed really believes his studies. How does that reflect on Aljazeera? All they're doing is reporting on recent claims from academia. All newspapers report stupid science news. So what?
-FL
Jerry Levy (one of my favorite psychologists) has an interesting theory about dolphins and how dumber they are then people expect. Intelligence tests do find that the big-brained dolphins are not anywhere near as clever as they ought to be judging by brain size.
Humans have a great big corpus collousum -- it keeps both hemispheres of the brain at the same activation level. When we sleep, both sides function in unison -- I think we're talking deep sleep, here, not REM, where the two hemispheres are both active.
Dolphins cannot sleep for long. They need to breath, which means coming up for air, and so the corpus callousum of the dolphin is small -- the two hemispheres do NOT have the same activation. One goes flat while the other stays active. Hence, the dolphin is only really effectively using about half his brain at any time.
And hence, the dolphin is only half as smart as you'd expect per the brain size.
?morf emoc eltsac cisalp looc taht did erehW !yeH ...ood ...ood ...ood
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Just to clear things up, for the record:
:)
"Lesser women" is a contradiction in terms in this context: I'm a man.
I can only take credit for being willing to stick with Andy after his stroke. It's a long and ugly story, but following an argument with his custodial parent several years ago, they won't let me see him. To avoid making the story even longer and uglier and dragging the rest of the family into it, I've chosen not to fight it. The "up" side of his memory loss is that he doesn't realize that I haven't been 'round to see him in a long time.
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