Researchers find that wild cleaner fishes can remember being caught up to 11 months after the fact, and actively try to avoid getting caught again.
Photo by Reuben Hustler on Unsplash
In the wild, where environmental conditions often vary and challenge their inhabitants to their limits, memory serves a vital role in helping animals survive and reproduce successfully.
The cognitive ability enables the storage and retrieval of various information, and we know that factors such as uncertain food availability and risks for predation could have played a role in the development of long-term memories, shown to span from a few months to decades in nonhuman animals.
Although fishes have been shown to retain information from a few weeks up to several months, studies revealing high cognitive capacities in fish are still scarce. In this study, researchers attempted to add to the pool of information by confirming that wild cleaner fishes can remember being caught.
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