Scientists teach goldfish how to drive ‘fish-operated vehicle’
- Six subjects were put in a fish tank on wheels and rewarded with food if they managed to steer it to a target location
- The Israeli researchers said it was ‘challenging at first’, but the goldfish were all successful after a few days of training
If teaching your 16-year-old how to drive was rough, imagine how tough it is to teach a goldfish.
In a peer-reviewed study published in December, scientists aimed to do just that by training goldfish to drive a “fish-operated vehicle” – or FOV – to study the navigating mechanisms of the species.
Six different goldfish got behind the wheel of the FOV that was operated by a camera system to record and translate the fish’s movements into forward, backward and side-to-side directions to the wheels, according to a press release from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
“The study hints that navigational ability is universal rather than specific to the environment.
“Second, it shows that goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in,” Shachar Givon, an author of the study, said in the release.
Each fish was put into the FOV – equipped with a fish tank – at different locations in a room and tasked with a goal to drive to a visual target.
If they steered to the target, they were rewarded with a fish pellet.
