Natures wonders: archerfish (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 23, 2022, 16:22 (882 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTES: “These features make them a powerful model for studying visual cognition in fish, a group that diverged from its most recent common ancestor with humans roughly 420 million years ago.”

Quoted simply to emphasize the nature of “common descent”, which means that all life forms (other than the very first) have descended from earlier life forms.

“His team has argued that archerfish respond to stimuli in a volitional manner—that is, by processing and acting on information in a way that goes beyond purely reflexive reactions—and preliminary work suggests that the animals engage in prosocial behaviors such as food sharing.”

"While it was thought that a highly evolved brain that includes a cortex was needed for social behaviors, “now we can see very complex social behaviors even in fish,” Gabay tells The Scientist, suggesting that alternative mechanisms can lead to sociality."

DAVID: they are just like human archers. What this means it is the design of the archerfish neurons that allow this degree of cognition. No. it is not just brain size but the neuron design.

dhw: Thank you for yet another wonderful illustration of animal intelligence, which “goes beyond purely reflexive reactions” (what you would call automatic behaviour). It doesn’t take much imagination to extend these observations to the amazing intelligence and social behaviour of cells and cell communities. The only thing that prevents some people from taking this step is what Shapiro calls “large organisms chauvinism”.

A nice sidestep to my observation about their neuron's probable design.