by Wild fish can say apart-at least if they wear different outfits-researchers found in a study that they could say to change our relationship with the creatures.
It is known that certain domestic animals – or those who live near humans – can say one person from another, as a skill researcher could say that certain people tend to share resources with them, or vice versa Represent danger. However, such discrimination is less well known in wild animals.
Now researchers have found that Wilde Fish can say two people apart, apparently what they wear.
“You only use simple mechanisms that you use every day in your life and you adapt it to you [recognise] People ”, said Maëlan Tomasek, first author of research by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.
Tomasek and colleagues in the biology magazine report letters how you carried out the study in open water in the Mediterranean.
In the first stage of the study, a researcher spent 12 days sattled Seebrom and black Seabom to follow it by repeatedly offering them food and rewarding those who followed when they swam away.
The trainer was then accompanied by another researcher who was either dressed in identical diving equipment or diving equipment with different colored spots and fins. In both scenarios, the two divers swam in different directions before returning to the starting point and repeating the process. While both researchers were wearing food, the fish only received a reward when they followed the trainer.
The researchers carried out 30 attempts for each outfit and used video recordings to count the number of fish after each diver. They reported that both types of fish more frequently than the other researcher, with this preference in the course of the tests more pronounced than the divers wore different outfits, which the trainer followed more frequently.
For both types, the team found that some individually identifiable fish were better to follow the trainer, which in turn indicates that the animals learned which divers they should follow.
However, when the divers wore the same outfit, no such effect was observed for the black bream, while the saddle bream was only followed by the coach during the middle tests. “All in all, if we were wearing the same outfit, we have no evidence that they can discriminate against us more,” said Tomasek.
The team says that the fish, since they had no experience with people, probably used the existing skills based on visual information to tell the divers. “It shows very simple mechanisms of how pattern recognition or color detection is used and co -opted for the use of human detection,” said Tomasek.
Tomasek added that the study could illustrate us, rethink the way we could treat fish, including killing and food. “It is very human not to take care of them, but the fact that they can take care of us, maybe it is time that we can take care of them too,” he said.
