While these water-dwellers obviously don’t talk in the ways humans do, what this means specifically is that there’s a moment in their prime sensory systems in which there is a type of “pause” before putting on a more emotional display.

To come to this conclusion, the researchers of the study observed a type of electric fish called mormyrids and tracked the pulses they use to communicate with each other. They observed that the fish communicated differently when they were with another fish as opposed to when they were alone in their tanks, producing sharper, higher bursts of pulses after pausing in conversation with their companion.