Fish Can Count to Four

Khemist writes "Fish can count, according to scientists, who have found that North American mosquito fish have the ability to count up to four. Previously it was known that fish could tell big shoals from small ones, but researchers have now found that they have a limited ability to count how many other fish are nearby. This means that they have similar counting abilities to those observed in apes, monkeys and dolphins and humans with very limited mathematical ability."

Comments

Makes sense

[clonan]

They are in School!!!

(Yes I know, I know! It is a stupid joke)

Re:Makes sense

[dgatwood]

My clownfish, you're gonna have a halibut time making people laugh with that old joke. That said, something does seem fishy about the whole situation.

Hmm. Something tells me you just got schooled.

Or not..

[Brian Gordon]

Neurons fire when a certain threshhold of other neurons are firing around them, does that mean they can "count"? It's an electrochemical reaction, not intelligence.

Re:Or not..

[clonan]

By that deffinition please explain how "intelligence" is any different...it is bigger, more complex but still the same general idea.

BTW they never said that fish were "intelligent" only that they could descern 4 from 3.

Re:Or not..

[Ed Avis]

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." -- Dijkstra

I think a similar principle applies to this experiment. They showed that goldfish can count to four. Whether this signifies 'intelligence' in some abstract sense is a different question, and not really relevant here.

Re:Or not..

[soren100]

Neurons fire when a certain threshhold of other neurons are firing around them, does that mean they can "count"? It's an electrochemical reaction, not intelligence. All humans have going for them is electrochemical reactions in neurons as well (in terms of intelligence). If your statement was at all correct (which it isn't) you would be "disproving" intelligence in humans as well.

Research on fish intelligence is showing some interesting results -- here is an impressive video of fish swimming in unison in response to hand signals . Science is busily proving that fish are smarter than most people realize.

If you believe in the theory of evolution, which most Slashdotters hopefully do, this will only make sense -- learning, reasoning, emotions, and other forms of mental activity had to evolve through different life forms before reaching their highest expression in humans. If you didn't believe that, then you would have to believe that all of the human mental gifts just somehow spontaneously "appeared" out of nowhere. (or were granted through "creation" for example).

Hmm...

[mckinnsb]

"Limited mathematical abilities?" I wonder if they can shift left one bit...

Re:Now What?

[apdyck]

Only once we learn that they can count backwards from four...that way they know how many mini-torpedoes they have left based on how many they've fired.

one fish, two fish

[stoolpigeon]

red fish, blue fish

Does that make it "1 in 4"?

[Loibisch]

Does that mean the child molestion rate among fish is even higher than among humans.

Clever Hans

[suso]

Have they ruled out the Clever Hans effect? Doesn't look like it.

Re:Clever Hans

[aproposofwhat]

Well if there is a Clever Hans effect, it's even more astounding, because it would imply that these fish are able to pick up on the experimenters' body language!

Re:Clever Hans

[esocid]

Have you seen a mosquitofish? Those things are most likely not able to discern body language and cues from humans nearby. Even if they were, I doubt that the fish had any interaction with humans during this experimentation. In TFA the females were observed being harassed by male fish and given a choice of either a 3 fish or 4 fish school, and chose 4 over 3. Those characteristic decisions were on par with human infants 6-12 months old, which is pretty impressive for a type of minnow.

Re:Clever Hans

[spun]

I doubt researcher in the field of animal intelligence would know about this completely obscure effect. I mean, it's not like the clever Hans case was a seminal event in the field of comparative psychology which completely changed the way everyone did animal experiments for the past 100 years. Thanks for bringing up this little known incident.

Sorry, sorry, it's a pet peave of mine when some /. poster thinks that scientists don't consider the most obvious and well known aspects of their field. If you, someone not in their field, have considered it, chances are pretty damn good they have too.

Bad for cardassians...

[geminidomino]

Gul Madred: There are five lights.
Jean-Luc Salmon: I only count four. ... ...
*6 hours later*
Gul Madred clicks on a fifth light.
Madred: How many lights do you see?
Salmon: There are FOUR lights!
Madred: *facepalms*

Re:Bad for cardassians...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, except it should have been Jean-Luc Pilchard. (And Gill Madred).

I;m not sure

[techpawn]

Not sure if the can count but I think my betta fish is learning how to lift the gate that separates it from the other betta in the dual betta tank. A few minutes after I close the gate he's there at the bottom trying to lift it. I know fish are smarter than most give them credit for, thank god there not a reverse scuba suit...

Re:I;m not sure

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

The betta I had as a kid could recognize me. When I opened the lid to his little tank he would come to the surface on the right side, where I would drop food. He wouldn't come when my brother (who never fed him) did the same thing. We were both about the same height, same hair and skin coloring, etc., so that's pretty clever, at least for a fish. Hell, my own father still can't tell us apart. I suppose I should have fed him more often.

Anyway, the point is that fish aren't mindless automatons like everyone thinks. They have a (limited) ability to learn (simple) things.

Re:I;m not sure

[matria]

One summer an orb spinner spider build her web above the porch stairs. I began feeding her when she and the bugs were small; I'd toss them into her web. Towards the end of summer, she was huge, no longer maintained her web, and she would come down from under the eves to the bottom of the matted mess that was left whenever I stepped on the stairs, waiting for me to toss her something, but not for anyone else.

Just like rabbits.

[Stavr0]

Rabbits: One, Two, Three, Four, Hrair Fish: One, Two, Three, Four, School

I Can count to Four...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

...therefore; I am a Fish!
Q.E.D.

Now, back to this fascinating "Dianetics" you were talking about....

Perhaps Best Not to Publish This Research

[hardburn]

This will only encourage PETA to make loud press releases about how fish are "intelligent, sensitive creatures" and how the Inuit diet is a source of great evil in the world.

so off the mark

[hesaigo999ca]

It's sad how they test to see if fish can count, or even assume that they are in fact counting, when they could be looking at the overall size ratio of the school itself and not the fish collective individually. This is one of those studies we pay for with our tax dollars, that I would highly decree to be a waste of money.

If I look over at a group of 2 diff. gangs and by instinct I will go for the bigger gang, then chances are that I will go for the visibly larger gang. Now to test if they were actually counting, I would place 3 HUGE almost mutated fish in one group and 4 excessively small fish in another then see what the result would be. The size of the 4 fish would have to be smaller then the size of the 3 fish together

There would be no counting, its the overall size that affects their brain at a visual level, not sitting there 1 + 1 + 1 I guess I'll go with the left group....they are affected also by movement so if the school of fish all go to the left, they see the change as it happens by the group, not that they think if they go left then i go left...

I really think sometimes studies like these actually make people stupid.

Re:so off the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're misunderstanding the article. They ARE testing instinctive behaviour. Nobody is claiming that these fish are deliberately making any conscious decisions, or that they understand why they're choosing one group over another. The term "counting" might be misleading you, as it does imply intelligent thought, but in this case they simply mean that they can tell the difference between 3 and 4, in certain situations. They probably shouldn't use the word "count", but it's easier to explain to the average joe that way, plus, of course, it sounds more impressive. I'm willing to bet the biologists never actually use the word "count" in their paper. You do have a valid question, in that we don't know if all the fish involved were of comparable size, or if that was even taken in to account. Perhaps a shoal of 3 gravid females would appeal more than a shoal of 4 scrawny young fish, but the article doesn't go into that much detail about the methods used and whether that was considered. However, you are incorrect to assume that the physical size or mass of the shoal is all that is determining the response, and for the same reason that you're right to point out that the size of the individual fish may matter... we don't have enough details about the experiments to understand that. They may have measured that, and they may not have. Even if you're right and they'd prefer a group of 3 large fish over 4 small fish, that still indicates that they are able to compare two groups and determine which one is bigger, they just would be "counting" a different factor... overall mass versus individual numbers. From a biological standpoint, it would be just as significant. Furthermore, the most interesting bit of the study is how the mosquito fish compare to other animals known to be able to discern between small numbers. It suggests that there's a fundamental mechanism for visually estimating size or quantity that's common to a wide range of animals, whether due to an ancient evolutionary origin or from multiple developments of a similar function. Which further suggests that, from an evolutionary standpoint, there's a benefit to knowing the difference between one, two, three, and four, but not as much benefit to being able to tell 10 apart from 14.

Also... unless you've been giving money to Italian universities lately, it's silly to complain about your tax dollars being wasted on this. :-)

Big Deal

[trongey]

I can count way higher than 4, and nobody's writing research papers about me.
Stupid fish.

We finally have proof!

[Gregour]

My goldfish is smarter than my president.

Subtle flaw, FEMALE fish can count to four

[SmallFurryCreature]

They tested the behaviour of FEMALE fish, not male ones. We know that in humans women are not as good at the hard sciences as men are. Offcourse counting to four barely classifies as hard science, except maybe in Utah, but still.

Still the article makes me wonder, how do we count. I am currently looking at the number of open tasks on my taskbar, there are 5, I counted four instantly. I am now trying to convince myself that this is because the fifth "icon" is where in previous KDE versions part of the start menu was so that I overlooked it and not that I have the brains of a fish. A female fish. Some hard liqour maybe inorder, although sadly I then also frequently have a problem counting past the fourth drink.

Fish approved for...

[lpangelrob]

Well, I suppose this means they're more than eligible to receive their own Holy Hand Grenades then. Science is always causing trouble...

The fish are counting in binary

[wildzeke]

The fish are counting on there front two fins, so of course you get 00, 01, 10 and 11.