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I know that we're all fish keepers on this site, and we all love our fish and maybe we credit them with attributes that the rest of the populace would never agree with, but fish know whats going on and I dare anyone to tell me otherwise I recently left a message asking for advice on moving fish out of one tank into my newly acquired second tank. I left that post saying something along the lines of "shouldn't be too hard to move the fish I want to, as they're the ones that are immediately looking for food when I go near the tank". Famous last words. So far I've spent 3 evenings trying to catch 7 fish in total, and I've still got one left.

Right, evidence for my above statement. I moved 2 DG from my new tank to the original tank, as I tried to catch them they're hiding under driftwood, behind plants, behind the filter, anywhere I can't get my net in to. After getting them in the original tank, I then wanted to move 5 Botia Sidthimunki from the original tank to the new tank. Now the DG can't keep away from the net - almost as if they enjoyed the ride in the net and want another go!

The Botia Sidthimunki, normally very gregarious and boisterous fish, straight at the surface if they think food is coming in (i.e. any time the lid is opened), suddenly nowhere to be seen. I managed to catch one all evening - and that was One-Eyed Willie who I suspect probably didn't see the net. Now as soon as the cover is opened they suddenly disappear. I managed to catch another 2 by putting a food tablet in front of the net and catching them when they came to eat it (putting food in the net only caused them to eat from the outside of the net). I swear the remaining 2 have learnt from that and aren't falling for that now.

I've now only got one left to catch, but this one is taking no chances, whenever I approach the tank she's straight off into hiding.

The puzzling thing is, I've left the net in the tank in the vain hope that they will become used to the net and make it easier to catch them, or that at any moment I could spot the last loach in striking distance of the net. So how come every other fish in the tank - including the kuhli loaches that I'm never 100% sure are still alive in there - have all been out for a sniff round the net, except for the Botia S that I want to catch?

I'm willing to bet that if I changed my mind and decided to move my Cory's, they would suddenly disappear and the loach would be all over that net!!!

Given that I was brought up on the 'fact' that Goldfish have a 3 second memory, I'm finding this whole situation very frustrating

I know thats gone on a bit, but I had to get that off my chest. Any other stories out there of fish having human abilities at times?

Fish - can't live with them , can't live without them (I think that's how the saying goes).

Once I got so mad trying to catch neons in my little 10G I had to take everything out and use a huge net, where I still had trouble.

Oh and I had to catch my goldfish in my pond, well that was a pain, I drained the water down to a inch to catch him, and he was a big fish in a little pond, harder then catching a chicken. Grease Lightning!

10gallon: 8neons 5gallon: 1betta
1oto
2platys

any time I need to pull one of my Mbuna for stripping I have to take all the rocks out of the tank, since the fish have a magical ability to interpose the single rock I might accidentally leave between the net and themselves.
try chasing only a particular one when they still have all their cave to hide in? I think not!

proud father of a bunch of baby haps. http://picasaweb.google.com/Sktchy/BABIES

Me too Sktchy. I have to completely stip the tank to get my mbunas. And *still* they skitter off and hide behind the filter inlet.

Fortunately that circus event doesn't occur very often.

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~~~ My fish blow kisses at me all day long ~~~

As you can see from my sig, I too have an uncatchable fish. The sad thing is it's a black skirted tetra, it looks soo slow yet always seems to avoid the net. I removed 4 zebra danios and 3 corys to my 29 and it was supposed to go too.. needless to say the others are in the 29. I have spent so much time trying to catch that fish and still haven't prevailed. I have come to the conclusion that I might as well add a school of them to the tank, I was looking for something else to add anyway.

What does that mean, Bob? "Till the cows come home." Where have the cows been?

To be quite honest, one of my biggest reasons for not working in a lfs is my terrible fish-netting ability. The spouse is much better at it so he gets recruited for that job.

Some fish just make netting a huge challenge though. I had 6 kuhlis in a 10g QT that were ready to move yesterday. Even in a bare tank it took him a loooooong time to catch all of them

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There is water at the bottom of the ocean

Oh yes, fish have memory and intelligence all right.

Back when I first acquired Pandas, I also acquired some Beckford's Pencil Fishes. The saga of the psychotic Beckford's has been repeated here several times, so I'm not about to visit that again. However, they contributed to a remarkable piece of behaviour that I have also mentioned before and which in my view constitutes not only evidence that fishes possess memory and intelligence, but that they also communicate to their fellows.

One day, I dumped a nice big batch of live food in the aquarium. Cue nutty Pandas beetling about the gravel stuffing themselves with live Bloodworm. However, on this occasion, one of the Pandas was busy chewing away, working the bloodworm in and out of its mouth, presumably to allow the pharyngeal teeth to get a good purchase, when all of a sudden, along comes one of the male Beckford's Pencils and takes the Bloodworm right out of the poor Panda's mouth.

After looking thoroughly bemused (believe me, Pandas have facial expressions!) whereupon I could mentally insert a speech bubble containing the words "Hey? Where did my lunch go?" the Panda beetled off to find another Bloodworm.

However, I noticed a change in the behavour of my Pandas soon afterwards. First of all, the 'mugging victim' began sitting on top of his Bloodworm to forestall future thefts. Then, he somehow communicated this to the other Pandas, and they all started doing it. They would become particularly assiduous guardians of their prospective meals if the Beckford's Pencils turned up.

I am sure that quite a few Cichlid owners have interesting anecdotes about their fishes too - large Cichlids such as Parachromis managuensis are particularly notorious for being, in some cases, smarter than the aquarists keeping them. For example, if a Jag decides that it doesn't like your aquarium furnishings, it will try and rearrange them if it can. If it discovers that it can, havoc ensues. Not least because, as Dr Paul Loiselle reported in The Cichlid Room, a large Jag or other Guapote is a powerfully muscular fish, with more than enough physical strength to perform such feats as launching heaters out of the aquarium like Polaris missiles (indeed Loiselle reports one Guapote doing precisely this!). Remember that big Cichlids in particular are fishes that perform modifications to their environment in the wild (digging pits in substrates, moving rocks or pieces of wood about etc), usually with a view to maximising the environment's suitability as a family home for 2,000 or so baby Cichlids, and thus the average big Cichlid can be thought of in some respects as being a bit like Tim Allen with fins - Home Improvement hilarity quite often ensues when big Cichlids get to work, the only thing missing being power tools for the fishes to deploy in the pursuit of serious DIY carnage. I suspect that if ever a Midas, Black Belt or JD ever learns how to use a circular saw, humanity is doomed ...

On the subject of fishes modifying their environment, I once witnessed an Electric Blue Damselfish doing just that. This little Damselfish ws picking up coral sand and bits of broken shell from the aquarium floor and moving it from one place to another. The fish in question was a small individual, probably no more than 4 centimetres long, but the amount of material it was shifting was astonishing to behold. Moreover, it wasn't just randomly dumping its landfill anywhere, it was carrying the excavated material to a specific spot and creating a purpose shaped pile. Since it was doing this in a dealer aquarium, and I didn't have time to stand and watch it for the several hours it would have taken to determine the purpose of the exercise, I never did find out what plan it had formed in its mind, but the fish's actions were very definitely purposeful, and executed with some precision, which means that the fish in question definitely possessed in its mind a model of 'before' and 'after', and the steps required to effect the transition between the two visualised states. Since this took place back in the late 70s, it was way too early for the fish to be christened "Bob The Builder", but I suspect that quite a few Damselfishes with similar excavating habits today are inviting similar pet names ... when not inviting expletives from aquarists who have had their carefully aquascaped marine aquaria thoroughly trashed by a small Damselfish.




Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

yeah SA's are kinda scary.
I have a convict that's only about 2" long, but he's made short work of scaring off an 8" oscar and a 5" JD. not to mention wreaking havoc on the careful environment modifications that the oscar and the JD had made.

really, when it comes to SA's, it's better to just give them gravel and some rocks and driftwood, and let them make their tanks, unless you can epoxy everything to the bottom of the tank!

proud father of a bunch of baby haps. http://picasaweb.google.com/Sktchy/BABIES

The behavior of reshaping environment can be seen best with Parrot Cichlids. I don't own any but I have been watching a pair in a tank at the LFS. They used to pick up each piece of gravel and place it somewhere they had already chosen for that particular piece. It was not random pick and drop thing. I even saw it placing a piece of gravel at the mound at one location, then picking up again as it was not satisfied with the placement, and then placing it somewhere else.
I think its instinct more than intelligence.
But they are intelligent, no doubt, and they do have memory. My giant gourami always comes rushing towards to front of the tank when I'm around. It definitely recognizes me. And it shows this pet like behavior only to me.
And most of my fish freak out and go straight to their hiding places on the very sight of a fish net.

All of my fish food is stored under my 75g. The big guys in that tank (oscar & sev) recognize when they see 'their' food in my hand. If I hold up one of the containers of food for the other fish they swim away

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There is water at the bottom of the ocean

The rage of the LHG is legendary when it comes to fish messing him about. I have been known to quite simply empty a tank of any and all decoration in order to remove a smartass fish on several occassions. I have as you probably know an awful lot of rainbowfish, and they will shoal coordinatinly to stop you getting the fish you have singled out for capture. In heavily decorated and planted 120 gallon long tanks this can get very frustrating since they can also accelerate from about 0-30 mph in about half a second dead, and keep such antics up for much longer than my ailing spine can take being bent over and leaning into the tank. After 3 tank moves I also have some talking catfish that I may as well just grab and take the personal blood loss, and pain, because they are now so wise to nets bags and bottles.

In particular I have one large silver dollar that fights defensively rather than be moved. Now if i chase him around with a net he zips past it and bites my hand directly, and believe me, he takes little chunks out of my fingers!

The funny thing about goldfish memory is that its just a myth. Im not quite sure how this myth took hold because im not really sure if any creature has anything as short as a 3 second memory, and frankly if an animal did have such a memory, what would be the point? Lets be honest , forgetting that a predator is trying to eat you after only 3 seconds isnt going to stop you being eaten. The perfect disproof of this as I remember was a guy who set up a small football field in his goldfish tank and insisted the goldfish scored at least one goal with a neutrally water weighted football before it got fed. The goldfish naturally started scoring goals quite often, after all, when was the last time you saw a goldfish not wanting to be fed?

I have a few fish, cichlids , and even catfish that refuse to allow me to plant anything in certain locations. No matter what i do, weight things, choose specimens with huge roots, the catfish and the cichlids will always move plants from these specific locations, but never touch the other plants.To remember that spot for years takes long term memory.

and if fish dont remember anything , how come when my girlfriend ( who isnt allowed to feed the fish goes close to the glass there is no reaction, but when i come close there is usually a massive greeting party in the tank, especially among the rainbows, and the blue acaras?

I think its pretty obvious that fish not only remember certain information all their lives , but can visually decern the differences between individual humans too!

Now this is the weird thing, and im sure im not alone... ( i hesitate here) but have any of you ever had the feeling that certain fish are trying to communicate something to you? That damn loopy hybrid parrot cichlid keeps trying to get my attention for something, even when its not hungry, and frankly this is disturbing me! I assumed it would be dumb as a rock, but its actually turning out to be one of the more intelligent fish. At the very least it seems to find looking at my face endlessly interesting. Sometimes I even wonder if hes as weirded out by me as I am of him. He even seems to come and spend time with me at whichever end of the tank I happen to be sitting at. I feed him, no interest in the food at all, but then hes still following me....

eeek!

and at this point if I said I had two altum angels who sit and watch BBC tv's "The Blue Planet" with me every time its on youd think I was barking mad. But then they do it at no other time whether the tv is on or not, and anyother time they limit themselves to the left hand side of the tank. Whether its vibrations from the music or what I dont know.

Can fish actually see the television pictures or do they see a different light pattern, or do they just see the scanner? I cant say I know, but then everyone loves a bit of attenborough.


Fish are weird.

since we know the biology of eyes, and how they work with the brain, it's a safe bet that your fish sees a similar image to the one you see, although the likelyhood that they recognize things in the same way is low since it doesn't benefit them in nature to recognize faces.
as for the fish watching you, my Mbuna keep me up at night sometimes, the light coming in through my window is just enough that I can see what they are doing, and every once in a while they're all just sitting at the front of the tank staring at me while I try to sleep...
it's like they're plotting my eventual demise...
it's scary!
as for the 3 second memory thing, goldfish supposedly have a 3 second short term memory, which says nothing about their long term memory as it is stored in a different part of the brain, I wish I could remember where I read that...
it explained how they tested it and everything...
how would you test that anyway?
would you use an electrode?
an aquatic electrode?
wouldn't that make a goldfish look like frankenstein?
how did I get on that train of thought?
...
yeah, fish are weird...

proud father of a bunch of baby haps. http://picasaweb.google.com/Sktchy/BABIES

yes i aggree,fish know for sure,and dont 4 get nothing,ive also emptyed a 55 gal,trying to get a little x-breed feeder that hadnt been eaten,my they are cunningthat can be a nigthmare