Sentience

Some sharks are smart cookies

Researching the intelligence of the grey bamboo shark a team of researchers at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Bonn, Germany showed that sharks could be trained to recognise and remember shapes for an extended period of time.

First juvenile sharks were subjected to three different cognition experiments, one at a time, and then tested to see how long the sharks could remember their training.

Painted Comber taking shelter in weeds.

Fish feel the blues too

Zebrafish suffering from chronic stress as a result of a genetic mutation showed signs of depression in behavioural tests.

Meanwhile, a doctoral thesis on stress response and frustration in fish by research fellow Marco Antonio Vindas at Norway's Environmental and Life Sciences University has also established that salmon have emotional responses, defined as more or less unconscious reactions in the brain triggered by consuming or positive situations.

Cognition in Sharks

A difficulty in obtaining information about wild animal behaviour is that detailed observations of different individuals is necessary over long periods of time, and this is especially hard to achieve with sharks. But in the shallow lagoons of French Polynesia, such observation was possible without the encumbrance of scuba gear, and without the problem of the shark disappearing into the depths.

Deep Trust In Sharks

Jim Abernethy, owner and operator of Scuba Adventures, was the dive operator who showed all of the others that sharks are peaceful animals who want nothing to do with humans as a food source.

He spends most of his time with wild sharks during dives from his liveaboard ship, The Shear Water, at remote sites in the vicinity of the Bahamas, and is on land for only about 40 days a year.

Does this whale talk?

Excerpts from Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 20, R860-R861, 23 October 2012

The whale lived among a group of dolphins and socialized with two female white whales. The whale was exposed to speech not only from humans at the surface -- it was present at times when divers used surface-to-diver communication equipment.

A painted comber hides in the seagrass

Fish get emotional too

Now, additional findings lends further credence to the notion that fish do indeed possess emotions and harbour thought processes. It turns out that fish growing up in the wild among predators use their left eye to look at novel objects, while their offspring raised in captivity use the right eye.