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."

Think I prefer dolphins

[vinsci]

• Dolphins save swimmer from shark [eurocbc.org] 1996-07-26
• Dolphins save man from shark attack [bbc.co.uk] 2002-07-23
• Dolphins save swimmers from shark attack [itn.co.uk] 2004-11-24

...and that's just a few of the top results from a quick Google search.

Better Article for Your Leisure Reading

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the link provided by the lead article in this discussion comes from Alijazeera, which has credibility on par with Joseph Goebbels [wikipedia.org].

The "Chicago Sun Times" offers a better version [suntimes.com] of the story.

Re:Smart is one thing...

[DrSkwid]

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.

Re:Why not use fat

[Fullhazard]

Because the fat would have to have two big holes in it, through which massive amounts of blood is pumped every minute.
It'd be like getting really good insulation on your house, then opening all the windows. It wouldn't stay warm very long.

Re:Uhmm. serious article?

[shellbeach]

I can not see how this is a serious article.

Well, Paul Manger [nih.gov] is a real scientist who's published 50 articles, most if not all in neuroscience areas, some with pretty high [google.com] 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!

And here's the article abstract itself ...

[shellbeach]

From PubMed [nih.gov] ... Note that nowhere in the abstract is the claim made that dolphins are stupid; it merely suggests that intelligence is not the driving force behind their large brain size. (Unfortunately I don't have access to the article itself, so who knows what claims he makes in the body of the text ... but the abstract sounds logical enough)

An examination of cetacean brain structure with a novel hypothesis correlating thermogenesis to the evolution of a big brain.

* Manger PR.

School of Anatomical Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, 7 York Road, Parktown, 2193, Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa. [e-mail]

        This review examines aspects of cetacean brain structure related to behaviour and evolution. Major considerations include cetacean brain-body allometry, structure of the cerebral cortex, the hippocampal formation, specialisations of the cetacean brain related to vocalisations and sleep phenomenology, paleoneurology, and brain-body allometry during cetacean evolution. These data are assimilated to demonstrate that there is no neural basis for the often-asserted high intellectual abilities of cetaceans. Despite this, the cetaceans do have volumetrically large brains. A novel hypothesis regarding the evolution of large brain size in cetaceans is put forward. It is shown that a combination of an unusually high number of glial cells and unihemispheric sleep phenomenology make the cetacean brain an efficient thermogenetic organ, which is needed to counteract heat loss to the water. It is demonstrated that water temperature is the major selection pressure driving an altered scaling of brain and body size and an increased actual brain size in cetaceans. A point in the evolutionary history of cetaceans is identified as the moment in which water temperature became a significant selection pressure in cetacean brain evolution. This occurred at the Archaeoceti - modern cetacean faunal transition. The size, structure and scaling of the cetacean brain continues to be shaped by water temperature in extant cetaceans. The alterations in cetacean brain structure, function and scaling, combined with the imperative of producing offspring that can withstand the rate of heat loss experienced in water, within the genetic confines of eutherian mammal reproductive constraints, provides an explanation for the evolution of the large size of the cetacean brain. These observations provide an alternative to the widely held belief of a correlation between brain size and intelligence in cetaceans.

        PMID: 16573845 [PubMed - in process]

Re:Smart is one thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you simply don't understand what "memory" means in the technical sense. "Memory" is not required for learning, training, or routines.

Re:Smart is one thing...

[Carewolf]

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.

MythBusters answered this myth...

[antdude]

Sinking Titanic, Goldfish Memory, Trombone Explosion [tv.com]. Episode Number: 11 Season Num: 1M. Adam and Jamie had to train their goldfish to do race.

Re:Smart is one thing...

[dotgain]

While some tropical fish care for their young (and sometimes it's the male's job!), goldfish have nothing to do with them after laying the eggs. Except to eat the occasional one, of course.

Re:Bugs and rats smarter than people????

[RKBA]

"A fly has pretty much a hard-wired brain,"

True, but they are nonetheless capable of very complex behaviour even if incapable of learning. Here is a brief description of the brain of your adversary: "The brain of a blowfly (Phormia regina Meigen) weighs on the average 0.85 milligrams. Its maximum linear dimension is 1583 microns. It probably contains not more than 100,000 cells."

Source: "The Hungry Fly" by V.G. Dethier, (c) 1976. It's a 488 page hardcover book with maps and wiring diagrams of the fly brain. I also have an entire book about the brain of the Aplysia sea slug (which also has about 100,000 neurons) called ""Cellular Basis of Behavior" by Eric Kandel. If you think it's strange that I would purchase such books, just imagine what must have possessed the authors to write them! ;-)

Re:Short term memory?

[shawb]

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 [post-gazette.com], and sometimes even synchronized swimming [google.com] (Goldfish are not naturally schooling fish per say, so this behavior is definately trained.) And... umm... Texas Holdem [4kingpoker.com]. 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.)

Re:Smart is one thing...

[the_womble]

My goldfish show learned behaviours. For example, they swim towards a person standing on the side of the pond on which we throw in food, but not on the other side.

Re:Smart is one thing...

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:Smart is one thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Desert ants can't leave trails because the extreme heat and dry environment will dry up the chemical trail too fast to be useful. These ants have been found to navigate via memory.

Re:Bugs and rats smarter than people????

[CurlyG]

Try http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/04102 2104658.htm [sciencedaily.com], or http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 4/0024241&tid=191 [slashdot.org] for the slashdot take on it at the time.

Re:Bugs and rats smarter than people????

[50000BTU_barbecue]

"just spent about 10 minutes with a fly swat trying to kill **one** fucking fly that is buzzing around indoors"

They are very sensitive to variations in light levels and immediately fly away from the variation. However, they don't seem to have any sense of hearing in the lower frequencies so I use a vacuum cleaner to suck up annoying flies. The fly just sits there wiping its legs and by the time the crevice attachment sneaks up behind them, it's too late to take off in a hurricane and gloop! it's gone.

Re:What a crock

[phlegmofdiscontent]

You hit it right on the head. How many times have you seen someone walk into a glass door? I've seen it a few times and it's hilarious. For that matter, I've seen people walk into non-transparent objects (even done it myself). That doesn't mean humans are unintelligent, just unaware of all their surroundings.

Re:Furthermore

[nasor]

Heck, dolphins use tools.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/06 07_050607_dolphin_tools.html [nationalgeographic.com]

Re:Smart is one thing...

[dogmatixpsych]

From a behaviorist's standpoint that is true; however from a cognitive psychologist's standpoint that is false. There are two types of memory - implicit (roughly training and routines) and explicit (what we typically think of as memory).

Re:GNAA Adopts Trusted Platform Module

[Anonymous Coward]

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