Contrary to the common opinion that fish remember no more than three seconds, it turns out that they remember for several months * In an innovative method developed at the Technion, fish are trained to reach the source of a sound signal in order to eat, and thus are captured
Innovative research presented at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion, at the joint annual conference of the Israel Soil Science Association and the Israel Agricultural Engineering Association, disproves the opinion that fish have a short memory of only three seconds and states that there are fish whose memory span lasts 4-5 months. On this basis, researchers are developing a new and sophisticated technology forFish farming along the seashores, which relies on training fish to respond to the same sound.
Fish farming in the sea is done today in cages Those stationed in protected coastal areas. This method is common in the world, and it requires investment in cages, service rafts and the personnel required to constantly check the condition of the cages, feed the fish and collect them.
The method is controversial in terms of the environmental pollution resulting from the nitrogenous secretions of the fish, and in various parts of the world, fish farming in cages is even banned completely, due to the fear of damaging the quality of the environment.
The purpose of the research conducted at the Institute of Agricultural Engineering in the Agricultural Research Administration is to find a new and practical technological option for growing fish in the open sea, without harming the environment and while maintaining profitability for the breeders.
The proposed method is based on training minnows in captivity to converge towards a speaker that transmits acoustic signals linked to food in the water. By linking the signals to their input, the fish develop classical conditioning memory. After about a month of training in a closed enclosure, the fry are released into their natural habitat in the open sea. Later, the connection with the free fish in the sea is maintained by periodically transmitting the signals to which they have become accustomed, in order to preserve the memory of the conditioning. When they reach marketing size, the fish are "called" to the collection station using the signals known to them and captured.
The use of acoustic signals in the sea enables the control of large spaces and with it the coastal areas are turned into pastures for fish.
Beaz Zion, Ilan Karflos and Assaf Barki, who presented the research at the conference, said that "the method has many advantages, the fish grow in their natural environment without the use of cages and without environmental pollution. The feed is extremely economical and based mainly on the food found naturally in the fish's living space."
The conference on "soil, environment and agriculture" was jointly organized by the Israel Soil Science Association and the Israel Agricultural Engineering Association. About 120 people from all over the country took part in it. About 30 new studies were presented at the conference and in addition 28 posters were presented by students from the Technion, the Hebrew University (Faculty of Agricultural Sciences in Rehovot), Ben-Gurion University, and Tel Hai College.
Prof. Avi Shabiv, Head of the Environmental Engineering, Water and Agriculture Unit at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Technion, welcomed the conference attendees and said that "the problems of agriculture, water and the environment in Israel and in the world have become acute in recent years. We note that only a wise combination of the engineering and scientific aspects ensures a sustainable solution and responsible with these problems". In addition, he noted that after a long period in which the importance of the fields of agriculture and water among young people decreased, there is a renewed interest in issues related to water, agriculture and the environment. This resulted in almost a doubling of the number of people registering for these fields at the Technion and, as he understands, at other institutions as well.
21 תגובות
This method will cause irreversible damage to the genetic pool of the species, and will create a new natural selection in which only the fish that forget the sound will survive.
These will get to raise more offspring, and finally the long-term memory feature will disappear, we don't know what the effect will be on the breed, because we don't know what this memory is used for in nature.
In other words, let's go back to the lab 😉
Nir:
First of all, as you saw in my previous response (which I don't know why you ignored), I already maintained that your intention could be interpreted in a different way than the one I interpreted.
The fact that your words could be interpreted in several ways is not my fault and I'm sorry if I understood you in a different way than you intended, but I repeat - I messed with your words and not with myself.
There are simply a number of commenters here on the site who like to slander every researcher and I find it appropriate to slander the slanders when they seem unjustified to me.
By mistake (which was not my fault) I assigned your words to this category and hence, as I have already said (and as you have already ignored) the hostile style.
I understood the content of your words exactly as the cool commenter understood them and you could understand it from my comments.
Note that the cool commenter also didn't understand that you actually meant to talk about memory and not how to navigate.
The cool commenter responded in this case because he didn't understand the reason for what he said. He thought I was underestimating the possibility of navigation using a magnet when nothing I said indicated that. I do not underestimate this possibility and even repeated it several times in correspondence.
I already mentioned that even though the article was given a title talking about memory - this was not the intention of the study editors and the entire addition you referred to is an addition added by the authors of the article (by mistake) for the sake of bombast.
Anyway, I also noted that your (quite strong) claim about magnetic navigation is not supported by the article you provided which only makes it a suggestion. I pointed out the flaws in the proposal described in the article (without dismissing the idea as a whole).
Michael, you're getting into a bit of trouble with yourself. My claim does not go against the research, but claims that there are other and earlier data that prove that there is indeed a memory of more than 3 seconds and even much longer, months, years. For example, the salmon fish. The cool commenter was able to understand my words and agreed that it is possible that these animals, like us humans, developed during evolution ways and in this case, magnetite, which enables spatial orientation. That's the first thing. The second thing is your form of expression, it is indeed possible to make just claims even without the use of hostile rhetoric.
a good war is over,
Nir.
Ami,
I should note that during the last period when I visited my father, I also visited myself. We commenters sometimes have the 'unbearable ease of response', from email correspondence with readers and writers on the site I learned that we commenters should also have responsibility. With this ease of sending a response, we sometimes sin in superficiality and in the absence of discourse culture. In doing so, we alienate important thinkers whose style we get tired of over time. I am not directing my words to a child who wants to see his name emblazoned in proverbs, but to the seekers of true knowledge who seek to deepen their understanding by discussing with colleagues the lust for science. I think that we also need to take on a number of 'voluntary limitations', perhaps it is better for us to respond less quantitatively and respond more qualitatively, so that the discourse will be of higher quality and thus prevent quality seekers of knowledge from running away from us (I should note that I personally got the impression of you that you are not one of those who argue and quarrel, I mean My sayings are more to me and my shoulders).
Greetings friends, 🙂
דני
post Scriptum. - After more than a month of thinking about Yehuda's article 'stressing the galaxies' and dozens of times reading the article, I have an understanding/feeling that there is innovation in his approach. Innovation that does not contradict the factual information and may and can have interesting consequences. Would you also like to look at his article?
To Ami and Nir:
Re-reading the responses, I see that it was possible to understand response 4 in a different way than I understood it.
I understood response 4 as referring to the article and therefore I got angry, but it is possible that she referred to response 3 and if that is the case then there was no room for anger on my part.
If the intention of combining the two responses was to claim (in response 3) and then repeat and clarify (in response 4) that the matter of long memory is not new, then this is something I really agree with.
I also think that the purpose of the study was not to test the memory but to develop a method for exploiting fish and that the unjustified addition on the memory is the editors of the article and not the editors of the study.
In any case - what I wrote in my comments was correct and perhaps the most important of them in light of this interpretation of comments 3 and 4 is actually my reference to research on navigation.
Ami:
Another word about rhetoric:
When I use hostile rhetoric there is always a reason.
The reason is (almost always) that the things I react to in Tao are in my eyes some mixture of disdain for others and lack of honesty.
In the present case, response 4 expressed disdain for the authors of the study.
Ami:
I see you've come back to yourself.
If we ignore your repulsive rhetoric and your baseless accusations, then:
1. The article does talk about memory and it demonstrates this by conditioning related to audio signals.
2. Response 4 begins with the following text: "They must not have undergone any vocal conditioning." I don't understand how you managed not to understand that my comments were aimed at the fact that when they said that, Nir said that the authors of the article were lying and in addition to that he proposed an illogical mechanism that he claimed was supposed to explain their findings.
3. When I said that there is no animal that does not know how to navigate by sound - I did not mean bacteria or animals that do not navigate at all. Perhaps the claim that there is no such animal is exaggerated but it is what is called a form of expression and there was no intention here to take it literally. I would be happy, by the way, to hear what the many animals are that you are talking about, even though it does not belong to the discussion at all.
4. When I said that there is no debate about the fact that there are fish that use a magnet, I meant that there is no debate about that with Nir, because when they suggested the topic of the magnet as a substitute for sound, he simply missed the whole point. As you saw fit to tell me, even though you would have found it in my words if you hadn't decided in advance to go against me - the navigator was not the point.
5. The matter of navigation became an issue following Nir's response 4 and not following my words.
6. I hope that in 2009 you will learn to treat things matter-of-factly.
Michael R. (formerly Michael),
If we ignore for a moment the culture of repulsive rhetoric that you demonstrate and its inexplicable aggressiveness, then in my opinion you are twisting things and taking them out of context.
Nir, in responses 3-4 says that fish remember their place of origin for years, no matter in what way, whether smell, magnet or sound - that is not our business here. The principle is that they remember for years something they learned in the past. In his original comments he did not say a word about times. You, in response 5, introduced the time dimension whose context to Nir's responses does not exist.
The article deals with the memory of fish and the application of this feature for fishing needs. This is also what the comments up to comment 4, inclusive, deal with. The rest of the entanglement with times and magnetism you introduced unnecessarily. Therefore, there is no point in using blunt rhetoric (which is in any case graceless) and disparaging ("Do you believe in reading in coffee"), because the lack of understanding in this case is actually yours.
Moreover, I will add that:
"There is no animal in the world that does not know how to navigate by sound" and in response - there are many of them.
"There is no debate about the fact that there are fish that use the magnetic field for navigation" and in response - there is a big debate about this and the matter is completely incomprehensible to science.
"The claim is only that here there is no challenge of navigation but only a challenge of timing" and in response - no. These are not the claims of the article. The article talks about (1) long memory in fish and (2) the use of this information to capture them. No mention of navigation in any case. Navigation is already a mix of the various responses with the article and the matter was taken out of context following your response (No. 5).
I hope that in 2009 you will learn a little modesty and soften your aggression towards other writers, because this combination of being arrogant and being wrong is a terrible combination.
Happy New Year
Ami Bachar
Nir:
Without detracting from everything I said before, now that I've read the article you linked to, I must express my deep disappointment in it:
1. The article does not say at all that the fish make use of the magnetic field. He proposes this as a theory to be tested experimentally.
2. The article's presentation of this idea as "new" after years of talking about such abilities in birds is pathetic.
3. It seems that the thinkers of the idea did not think it through to the end because they propose a mechanism that allows perhaps the identification of the "home port" but do not talk about the navigation mechanism that allows the return to it. After all, every 3-year-old child knows what his house looks like, but if you land him in the middle of the Gobi desert, there will be no chance that this knowledge will help him.
Nir:
There is no dispute that there are fish that use the magnetic field for navigation.
The claim is only that here there is no challenge of navigation but only a challenge of timing and this problem along with the problem of navigation is solved through the sound.
If you didn't understand this from my previous response, you should read it again.
If the magnetic field was enough, then there would be no need to train them at all because there is always a magnetic field.
According to this strange theory, all the fish would always come to the meeting with the fishermen at any stage when the fishermen felt like fishing them even without any training and conditioning.
Really genius fish. With such a memory, it is better that they go vote in the elections and not the public who forgets what the corrupt politicians do to them during the term
It requires common sense. no more..
Enjoy.
people:
They told me: do you not read the article and do not try to understand the comments at all?
It says that speakers are turned on to call them.
There is no animal in the world that does not know how to navigate by sound. Why should a magnet be required in this matter? Even when you were called home to eat when you were children, did you navigate using a magnet?
But all this, as I already mentioned in my previous response, is not the main thing.
In order to catch them, they need to arrive in the area at a known time - the time when the people who will catch them arrive.
Do you think the information about the time and the intentions of the fishermen is coded in the magnetic field? Has something in evolution qualified the fish to extract this kind of information from the magnetic field? Do you believe in reading in coffee?
Cool,
You are probably right about the navigation of birds, but I think Michael meant that the salmon probably (!) navigate using the particular smell and taste produced by the water of the particular river in which they were born.
Michael, don't underestimate! According to evolution, it is very possible that animals whose navigation helps them survive will develop an organ that contains something similar to a compass that helps them know the direction in which they are moving.
To remind you, we have a balance organ in the inner ear, the main part of which is liquid.
Why wouldn't birds or fish have a north organ whose main part is magnetite?
Nir:
What are you talking about?
How do they know when to come? Also according to the compass?
They must not have gone through any vocal conditioning. Rather, accurately remember the place based on the magnetic position of the Earth) to which they navigate back just like a compass.
Regarding the memory of 3 seconds, it is possible that it is a working memory WORK MEMORY because it is known that salmon fish accurately remember the place where they were born after they leave the river on their long journey to the ocean waters and back.
Even in the sea, many species suffer from the reduction of their living areas due to fishing that causes a reduction in their food,
Pollution, changes in the acidity of the sea, changes in the weather and other man-made damages.
The proposal to release edible fish into these depleted habitats will further push out the local species and lead to their extinction.
For the sake of full disclosure, it should be noted that I see eating and exploiting animals as immoral and harmful
for ecology.
The trick is interesting but I see a problem with it.
Obviously as our technology advances, we will deliberately identify the individuals that grow faster and yield better meat. It is very possible that we will even create genetic changes in our fry populations, as it is customary to do in cows for example. Then, the trained fry are released into the sea, some are devoured, some die, some come back and are caught and a small part forgets and no longer reacts and remains in the sea. This is a serious ecological problem, since genetically modified fish thus penetrate the sea and may harm other populations. I really hope that both the research and the industry will take into account phenomena of this kind that might be spared when it comes to fish cages (which are a controversial thing and apparently constitute a serious marine and environmental pollutant).
Greetings friends,
Ami Bachar