Fish Are Not Insentient Dullards

Fish Are Not Insentient Dullards

By Ben Goldfarb

Source: nautil

4/26/2023

Credit: Grigorev Mikhail / Shutterstock

The lives of most captive fish are at once boring and bizarre. A zebrafish in a genomics laboratory or an Atlantic salmon in a fish farm generally endures conditions that would be utterly alien to their wild counterparts. The light is blinding, the walls smooth glass or concrete, the floor ungilded by so much as a plant. Even the water lacks the chemical complexity of a river or sea. It’s both a profoundly unnatural existence and, likely, a dull one.

Until recently, those conditions didn’t overly bother too many people. Compared to primates and other lab mammals, fish were perceived as insentient dullards who didn’t require stimulus; as a result, many researchers believed that the logistical challenges of enriching their subjects’ lives outweighed the benefits. But those ways of thinking are being replaced by an appreciation for fishes’ social and cognitive complexity, which raises the question: How do barren environments affect the lives of captive fish? And what might richer ones do for them?