Teen Proves Goldfish Have More Than 3 Second Memory
When it comes to finding the first pet for the kiddos, what animal generally lands at the top of the list? Some parents may opt for a cuddly kitty or rambunctious puppy, but I bet most settle on the humble goldfish.
Cheap, easy to care for, and (sort of) cute, the goldfish has been a staple pet for countless households. That wasn’t always the role the little-finned friends use to play, though.
Two millennia ago, the Chinese bred the goldfish as a food animal, a species harvested for human consumption. However, around the 14th century, the fish started to become a pet rather than something you saw on your plate.
That’s a long time for a lot of ideas about the goldfish to cement themselves in popular memory, some truthful and some not quite accurate. For instance, people tend to believe that the goldfish is almost always a tiny creature.
That’s a massive misconception. Given enough time and nutrition, they can swell up to about the size of a football.
Most of us also think of them as rather stupid creatures, flighty little fish with three-second-long memories.
Yet when a schoolboy from Adelaide, Australia, put that idea to the test in 2008, he ended up with some surprising results.
Rory Stokes of the Australian Science and Mathematics School started an experiment where he would place a red Lego in his goldfishes’ tank and then sprinkle food around it.
He did this for three weeks, and at the end of that period, the goldfish would cluster around the plastic block even before he introduced the food.
Rory then left them alone for a week before reintroducing the Lego — but no food. You know what happened? The goldfish swarmed the Lego, showing they’d remembered his conditioning.
Culum Brown of Macquarie University in Sydney praised Rory’s methodology. “The thing that I really liked about Rory’s experiment is he not only got that classical conditioning going (but) the fact that he could get them (to) respond just to that specific coloured marker I thought was really good,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Other scientists have tried placing a level in a fish tank that dispenses food when pressed during a certain time of day. Sure enough, the goldfish figured out exactly when the need to tap it.
So the next time you peer at a flitting little flash of gold in a fishbowl, spare it more than a moment of consideration. Goldfish are far smarter than we’ve ever given them credit for.
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