This Will Make You Think Twice About Eating Seafood
The only fish that seem to have emotions are the ones searching for Dory or Nemo. But if you believe author Jonathan Balcombe, the director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy and author of the new best-selling book What a Fish Knows, some fish can grieve. And form relationships. And are generally way smarter than we give them credit for.
Balcombe isn't advocating you stop eating seafood, he's just presenting the research and hoping you come to that conclusion on your own. We spoke to him and discovered the intelligence of salmon, plus how two different species of fish go hunting together, like they're real people or something!
Goldfish can grieve
"They're social animals, like many species of fishes. I've heard dozens of stories from readers while researching this book about their pet goldfishes who had relationships that involve self-sacrifice. Apparently it looked like signs of grieving after one died -- one of the remaining fish would stop eating.
"They also need stimulation. The traditional stereotypical goldfish bowl has been banned in some parts of the world -- I believe in Rome. It's hard to enforce, but the fact that a government has done the research and concluded that it's wrong to keep them this way says a lot about what biology informs us about what is and isn't a suitable living environment for these animals. They can live over 40 years, they're social, and they have needs. And for those basic reasons, we need to afford them better treatment than putting them in a barren bowl."
Salmon are much smarter than you think
"People eat a huge amount of salmon -- and despite the myth of the three-second memory, they have the capacity to return to their streams where they were born.
"And how do they do that? It's a form of memory. They recognize and remember the chemical trail, a distinct chemical fingerprint of their home stream. Studies have shown that they'll return to their home stream hundreds, and even thousands of miles away. That's a form of intelligence, and I write about many other kinds of intelligence, like tool use and referential communication."
Some fish act like they're in a Pixar movie
"One that I find particularly surprising is the communication that happens between two different species on reefs who hunt cooperatively. These are groupers and moray eels, which are like the ferrets of the sea. Groupers have been observed in some locations to swim up to moray eels and make either a head shake or a body shimmy -- it's unknown if those have different meanings -- but they generally signal to the moray an invitation gesture, as in, 'I'm hungry, I want to go fishing. Come with me.'
"The way it works is the crayfish they're trying to catch flees into the reef while the moray is able to go into the nooks and crannies to chase that fish. If the moray catches the fish, the moray gets the meal. If the fish manages to flee into the open water -- well, you know who's waiting. It's the grouper. And careful analyses, observation, and data collection show that when they're hunting together, the two fishes get more food than they would if they're hunting individually.
"Referential signaling is considered a pretty high-level cognitive ability by biologists. The intentionality, the planning, the cooperation, the self-sacrifice in some situations. All of this stuff is pointing to a much more sophisticated kind of animal."
Fish feel pain
"I've come to the conclusion that they deserve equal moral consideration with all the other vertebrates -- that includes the furry ones and the feathered ones, as well as the scaly ones. I'm a longtime vegan and vegetarian, and I can talk to other vegetarians who almost laugh at the notion that they're asked, 'You eat fish, don't you?' We draw this line.
"The fact is that they literally and figuratively live below the surface of our consciousness. They're out of view. They have glassy, staring eyes. Well, you don't need to blink when you're in an aquatic medium -- that probably works against them. They make all sorts of sounds underwater, but in the air most of those sounds don't transmit, so we think maybe they're not feeling pain.
"I hope this will usher in a different, better attitude towards these animals. More respect, more concern, more stewardship, and more protection."
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