One of the biggest leaps in the 16 years since the first Blue Planet was broadcast was in comprehension of the cognitive abilities of fish, she said: “Gone is the notion of the goldfish and the seconds-long memory.” Some scientists argue that it is a flawed metric by which to assess intelligence when many species are precluded from demonstrating their smarts by their lack of physical dexterity, or their environment.īutler pointed to the “referential gestures” – a rudimentary form of sign language – of coral grouper in episode three as indicative of an intelligence on a par with chimpanzees. and he was finding those anvil sites.”Īnecdotal reports of fish using tools date back decades, but what little evidence of it exists – a 2009 paper documenting captive stingrays using water jets to flush out trapped food, for instance – has been tempered by debate over what tool use actually is.
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“When he couldn’t crack open a clam on one anvil site, he’d go to another. Rachel Butler, an assistant producer on the first episode, told the series’s accompanying podcast that the behaviour could not be purely instinctual as the tuskfish seemed able to adapt to circumstances. That this clam-cracking behaviour has been demonstrated repeatedly, and by wild animals, may help shore up the case for more advanced cognitive abilities of fish than previously thought.
The paper’s authors argued that it constituted tool use, considered a sign of intelligence in many species. The behaviour was first recorded in the Coral Reefs journal in 2011, with photographs showing a tuskfish grasping a cockle in its jaws and striking it repeatedly on a rock. The tenacious tuskfish filmed cracking open a clam on coral – “persistent Percy”, as he was named by those who shot the sequence on the Great Barrier Reef – could advance the case for the intelligence of fish. Photograph: Alex Vail/BBC Fish may be smarter than we once thought (episode one, One Ocean) An orange-dotted tuskfish holds a clam in its formidable jaws on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.
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