Wild fish use visual cues to recognise individual divers - presented by Dr Maëlan Tomasek and Katinka Soller

Wild fish use visual cues to recognise individual divers

Maëlan Tomasek and Katinka Soller

Dr Maëlan TomasekKatinka Soller
Biology Letters

Associated Biology Letters article

M. Tomasek et al. (2025) Wild fish use visual cues to recognize individual divers. Biology Letters
Article of record
Wild fish use visual cues to recognise individual divers
Dr Maëlan Tomasek
Maëlan Tomasek
Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive and Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Katinka Soller
Katinka Soller
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

Many animal species have been shown to discriminate between individual humans in captive settings and may use a variety of cues to do so. Empirical evidence remains scarce for animals in the wild however, particularly in aquatic contexts. For the first time, we investigated discrimination of individual humans by fish in the wild. We first trained two species of fish, saddled sea bream Oblada melanura and black sea bream Spondyliosoma cantharus, to follow a human diver to obtain a food reward. We then investigated whether they could discriminate between two human divers and follow the correct one in an operant conditioning paradigm. We show that both species were able to quickly learn to discriminate between the two divers when they wore different diving gear. However, they showed no preference when both divers wore identical gear, suggesting that discrimination is based predominantly on visual cues from the dive gear. We discuss the implications of these results for ethical considerations and research practices.

References
  • 1.
    M. Tomasek et al. (2025) Wild fish use visual cues to recognize individual divers. Biology Letters
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M. Tomasek and K. Soller (2025, January 31), Wild fish use visual cues to recognise individual divers
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Video length 24:56
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