Even goldfish can drive a four-wheeled vehicle: this is demonstrated by the video of a curious experiment conducted in Israel, at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, where a small fish was trained to drive his aquarium mounted on four wheels simply by touching the snout on the glass to indicate the direction to follow.
The result, published in the journal Behavioral Brain Research, shows that fish have the ability to orient themselves even in unknown environments that are very different from their natural habitat.
"The study indicates that navigation ability is universal and not specific to the environment," explains Shachar Givon, a researcher at the university's Faculty of Natural Sciences. “Second, the study shows that goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in a completely different environment than the one in which they evolved. Maybe with some initial difficulties, like anyone learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car ”.
Just like in driving school, the goldfish was put to the test on a special vehicle, basically a transparent tank filled with water and mounted on a trolley with four wheels. Thanks to a camera, the movements of the fish were recorded and then translated by software into commands to move the vehicle forward, backward, left or right. To verify that the movements were not random, the researchers placed a clearly visible colored target in front of the aquarium that could attract the animal's attention: every time the fish reached it, it was rewarded with a little food. After a few days of training, the fish learned to drive the vehicle to the target,without being fooled by other distracting factors and correcting the trajectory every time it ended up against the wall.
