These fish know when you’re watching them

These fish can know when you’re looking

By Gennaro Tomma edited by Andrea Thompson

Do you know that uncomfortable feeling of being watched? A new study shows that fish also seem to know when they or their children are being looked at and don’t like it. The work, published Tuesday in Royal Society Open Science, gives a rare insight into the minds of fish.

Previous research has suggested that some primates, pets and birds appear to possess what is known as attention allocation, that is, the ability to perceive where another individual is focused. “This means distinguishing not only who is present, but also what that individual is paying attention to,” says study author Shun Satoh, a fish biologist at Kyoto University in Japan.

To see if fish might possess this ability, the team traveled to Lake Tanganyika in East Africa to conduct different experiments on the emperor cichlid (Boulengerochromis microlepis), a species neither too fearful nor too aggressive towards humans. Using waterproof cameras, the team recorded the behavior of adult fish guarding their offspring when a diver looked at a fish’s eggs or its recently hatched young, looked in another direction, or looked at the fish itself. The researchers also observed what happened when the diver turned 180 degrees away from the nest.

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An analysis of the recordings showed that parents behaved aggressively towards divers more often when the human intruders looked at the offspring or the parent, than when the diver looked in another direction or turned away completely.

Although the authors acknowledge that the study is preliminary, the results suggest that “fish respond not only to the presence of a diver but also to cues related to where the diver’s attention is directed,” says Satoh.

The study is an excellent starting point for determining whether fish possess attention allocation, says Gabrielle Davidson, a behavioral ecologist at the University of East Anglia in England, who was not involved in the work. “Animals are so sensitive to eye stimuli that we would expect them to find the gaze threatening or frightening if it was directed at them,” she says. The study, however, appears to go further by showing that the fish might be able to track where the diver is looking. “It’s not just a reflexive response to having eyes on them.”

Davidson thinks this ability might be widespread in other fish species, but she adds that more research is needed to determine whether the fish are actually looking at the diver’s gaze or responding to other cues.

“One of the biggest challenges is knowing what’s in other animals’ minds,” she says. “These types of additional conditions and experiences can take us a step forward toward revealing the inner understanding of these animals.”

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