Natures wonders: Social behavior of fish (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 20:03 (3466 days ago) @ David Turell

Quite amazing what has been discovered:-http://www.nature.com/news/animal-behaviour-inside-the-cunning-caring-and-greedy-minds-of-fish-1.17614?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150528-"As two of the region's top predators, groupers and morays might be expected to compete for their food and even avoid each other — but Bshary saw them team up to hunt. First, the grouper signalled to the eel with its head, and then the two swam side by side, with the eel dipping into crevices, flushing out fish beyond the grouper's reach and getting a chance to feed alongside. Bshary was astonished by the unexpected cooperation; if he hadn't had a snorkel in his mouth, he would have gasped.-"This underwater observation was the first in a series of surprising discoveries that Bshary has gone on to make about the social behaviour of fish. Not only can they signal to each other and cooperate across species, but they can also cheat, deceive, console or punish one another — even show concern about their personal reputations. “I have always had a lot of respect for fish,” says Bshary. “But one after the other, these behaviours took me by surprise.”-***-"The fish, meanwhile, were already aceing a more advanced test. When Bshary and Brosnan switched the coloured plates so that the permanent one suddenly became temporary and vice versa, the fish again understood the switch faster than the apes did (and equally as fast as the capuchins)8. This is known as reversal learning — and when the primatologists read that result, they took note. “Reversal learning has often been touted as the gold standard of general cognitive abilities,” says van Schaik — a sophisticated skill that correlates with brain size. “Since small-brained fish do it quite well, maybe we'll have to abandon this idea.”-“'The ball is in our court,” says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford, UK, who developed the social brain theory. Dunbar now accepts that the evolution of large brains was not driven by the need to carry out single 'smart' behaviours such as cooperation or deception. But that doesn't mean the social brain theory has to be abandoned, he says — just refined. He and other primatologists now propose that primates evolved bigger brains because they needed an all-round high level of general intelligence to survive the pressures of living in tight social groups — for example, to recognize large numbers of individuals and remember their complicated genetic and hierarchical relationships."