Fish in the ocean can tell humans apart by what we're wearing underwater, a new study suggests.
While domestic animals like dogs can obviously distinguish between people, it's been less clear that wild animals have developed this capability. It's even more surprising that fish can do it.
Maëlan Tomasek and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour trained black and saddled seabream in the Mediterranean to follow researchers around. Later, another diver wearing different colored gear joined in. The fish still followed the first diver.
From The Guardian:
However, when the divers wore the same outfit, no such effect was seen for black bream, while saddled bream followed the trainer more during the middle batch of trials only. "All in all, when we wore the same outfit, we have no evidence that they could discriminate between us any more," said Tomasek[…]
Tomasek added that the study could prompt us to reconsider the way we treat fish, including whether to kill and eat them. "It's very human to not want to care about them, but the fact that they can care about us, maybe it's time that we can care about them, too," he said.
Previously:
• Fish-filled phone booth in Japan
• Tripod fish: a fish that stands
• Aggressive, carnivorous, air-breathing, land-walking invasive fish spotted in Louisiana
