• Question: I heard thatr fishes forget evrything after 3 seconds is that true?

    Asked by dm00 to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Sinead on 20 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Nope! Fish don’t have memories nearly as good as ours, but they can remember things. They can be trained to find the route through a maze to get food, and they’ll remember the correct route.

      A rather excellent TV show, Mythbusters did a segment where they showed that fish can be trained

      Here’s the video! http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/goldfish-memory-minimyth.htm

    • Photo: Sinead Cullen

      Sinead Cullen answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Hi,

      No fish can remember things but just not for as long as us, but for more than three seconds. Maybe if you lived in a bowl you would want to forget things every three seconds so you would think it was something new all the time 🙂

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      This is a lie.

      Fish might not be the brightest crayons in the box, but they do have memories longer than 3 seconds and they have been shown to have long term memories as well.

      This is a common mistake when animals have memories that work differently to ours for reasons of environment and survival. For example, it might not be very important for a fish (called Wanda) to remember a particular other fish (called Dori) or address (42 Wallaby Way, Sydney) because one fish is much the same as the next and the ocean doesn’t have streets. But it might be important that it remember how to find food or escape from predators, so they can navigate a maze like in Adam’s video. It’s just different. You have to remember to test the right thing before you go saying that fish have 3 second memories!

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