The fish seem to like cars.
A new video shows a goldfish driving a water-filled, motorized "car" from one end of a room to another, bobbing and weaving to avoid obstacles along the way. Scientists performed an experiment to understand how goldfish navigate.
In the wild, goldfish and many other species need to navigate to find food and shelter. It is not always clear how animals learn to navigate a space and whether the brain networks that allow them to navigate a coral reef would be of use on land.
What better way to explore animal navigation in a foreign environment than to take a fish out of the water?
Shachar Givon, a PhD student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, said that they had to build an inverted submarine because fish are notorious for not surviving out of water. The fish operated vehicle was a plastic aquarium that was mounted on a platform with wheels. A goldfish in the aquarium can swim and pilot a vehicle.
There are 10 weird experiments of 2021.
Getting a goldfish to drive a car is not new. A group called Studio diip developed a goldfish mobile that was more of a software demonstration than an exploration of fundamental animal behaviors.
Givon, Ohad Ben-Shahar, and Ronen Segev showed that the fish car is more than just a novelty. The fish had to be given somewhere to go.
Six goldfish were trained to pilot the FOV. Givon said training was the easiest part. I put it in a situation where it learns.
Each fish's movement was erratic as it swam from one side to the other. Givon said that the fish began to connect the dots and became more deliberate.
Givon told Live Science that if you put a person in a car for the first time without telling them anything about it, they will realize that what they do with the steering wheel matters. The same goes for the fish, but it doesn't realize it until it's too late.
Learning whether the fish can sense the environment around the vehicle is one thing, but getting the fish to move the vehicle is another.
The trials were easy in the beginning. Givon and her colleagues placed a pink cardboard square on the floor away from the vehicle, after the vehicle started in the center of a room. The fish received a treat if the vehicle moved across the pink square.
The fish car went from meandering around the room to darting directly at the target after a few days. Givon placed obstacles and fake targets in the arena in order to force the fish to adjust to the changes in its environment. The fish were used to the extra features and barely reacted to the obstacles.
According to Givon, this research suggests that goldfish can learn to navigate completely unfamiliar environments.
Givon wants to explore how fish learn to navigate longer routes in less-contrived situations. Givon said they want the fish to go outside and navigate. This could allow the researchers to observe how fish make decisions.
Givon said they were looking forward to fish all over campus.
The study was published in January.
Live Science published the original article.
