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)

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.

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

[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*

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.

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.