Marilyn Thipthorpe
When you think of fish, it’s probably as you and you would never imagine that these underwater being have emotions and feelings too. It’s amazing how fast science is advancing to tap into the mystic world of the consciousness, that too of fish!
Author Jonathan Balcombe, on the other hand, spends a lot of time pondering the emotional lives of fish. In his new book, What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins, Balcombe presents evidence that fish have a conscious awareness — or “sentience” — that allows them to experience pain, recognize individual humans and have memory.
How can we know if fish feel pain: The most elegant study of fish pain that I’ve ever seen … was done a few years ago by a biologist named Lynne Sneddon in the U.K. A shoal of zebra fish were kept in a pretty awesome tank and then about half were injected with an acid solution which is pretty on top of the pain chart and the other half were injected with a simple saline solution which wears off in a couple of minutes. A part of the tank was then infused with a pain killer solution and soon the fishes that that been injected with acid migrated and stayed there till the effects weaned off.
Some reef fish appear to recognize individual divers: Apparently deep sea divers and even snorkelers have noticed that when they frequent a spot often enough the fish seem to recognize them and swim up for a stroke or two not unlike a dog welcoming you home.
Fish use flatulence as a means of communication: There is one really curious example involving herrings that I can’t resist mentioning. I think if you were to come up with a phrase that best captures it, at least a delicate phrase, “flatulent communication” would be perhaps the right phrase. They live in big schools and they omit gases from the anus in large numbers, and it makes a sound. And they appear to use this as a communication device to maybe signal to others that it’s time we moved up or down in the water column, because it’s that time of day when the predators are coming out and this sort of thing.