• MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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      33 minutes ago

      Okay this has nothing to do with fish and everything to do with the mirror test. What does it say about you when you know you’ve acquired a doppelganger and you see a photograph and can’t tell if it’s you or the doppel in the photo because it was at the event where you met your doppel and that was 20 years ago. Like, we had the same glasses frames and everything it was weird

    • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip
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      14 hours ago

      (Sorry if you already know all this, I’m just excited about this and wanna share with people reading through comments)

      Its still unclear how much that reflects on fish broadly, and the researcher has actually expressed a belief that many animals could be much smarter than we have assumed because our experimental design was inadequate

      In their research they chose the color red for the mark on the fish (the mirror test and some other tests used for assessing animal intelligence requires a mark be put on the animal)- the researcher chose red because the parasites they have exposure to are red (clearner wrasse are fish that work in complex social groups to clean parasites off larger fish. I’m not sure if they might be impacted by red parasites themseleves or if its the color they look for when cleaning other fish, or both).

      When later tested with green they acted as if the mark wasn’t there, so the researcher feels theres a chance that tests failed to adequately take into account the way animals experience the world and may not have designed tests in line with what information would be ecologically significant to them. Had he not thought carefully about it and picked another color the test would have shown exactly what people expected of fish- that theyre not that smart

      This was a super cool video covering the progression of research https://youtu.be/s_aNH4hXz8I. For a long time his results were dismissed so he just kept writing papers and collecting more evidence

      • itsjustachairmary@lemmy.world
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        10 minutes ago

        Please never apologize for sharing like this, it is what makes us human and it is always a delight to share in the joy of sharing and learning.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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        10 hours ago

        You are delightful, and I really appreciate you, and this comment of yours. I didn’t know about this, but you’ve piqued my interest enough that I’m going to go read more about it now. It’s super cool!