Watch This Goldfish Drive an Aquarium on Wheels

The car was designed to move depending on the fish’s location in its tank, showing animals can understand how to navigate foreign environments

A quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein states, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

By that logic, how smart is a fish that can learn to drive?

In a new study, researchers designed a souped-up aquarium on wheels to see if a goldfish can learn to navigate on dry land—and it worked. The experiment is meant to determine whether a fish’s navigation skills are universal regardless of their environment. The study will be published in the February 2022 issue of Behavioural Brain Research.

For survival, animals need navigation skills to find food, seek mates, migrate and more. However, researchers do not fully understand whether these navigation skills are specific to the environment an animal evolved to survive in. The ability to use navigation skills in unfamiliar settings is known as domain transfer methodology, reports Jonathan M. Gitlin for Ars Technica.

To determine whether a fish can navigate on dry land, the scientists used a fish-operated vehicle (FOV) with special software and a motion-sensing camera that can monitor where the fish is swimming in its rolling aquarium.

When the fish bumps into the tank’s walls or swims forward, for example, a camera above the tank tracks that movement. Based on the camera’s signalling, an algorithm moves the tank, allowing the fish to “drive” the car. The algorithm is powered by a small programming computer called Raspberry Pi,

Before the experimental tests could begin, the goldfish needed to learn how to drive the FOV. Six adventurous goldish were enrolled in “driving school” to learn how to move the FOV before the team collected the data. In 30-minute sessions conducted every two days, the fish were rewarded if they successfully directed the car to a pink-colored target in an enclosed space, Ars Technica reports.

The fish’s movement, orientation, and location were translated into instructions for the wheels of the FOV, allowing the car to move forward, backward, left or right. To move in a specific direction, the fish must be facing outside the tank in the direction it was moving towards. If a fish was oriented toward the middle of the tank, no movement would occur, reports Aristos Georgiou for Newsweek.

Once the goldfish were ready to speed off, the researchers tested their navigational skills by seeing if they could drive to a target. To check and see if the fish were actually navigating to targets and not just memorizing movements to earn a reward, the team changed the FOV’s starting position and added decoy targets in different colors.

All six fish successfully drove toward the visual target and even approached their mark from different angles, suggesting that the fishes understand the world around them, per Ars Technica. They all avoided dead-ends and corrected themselves throughout the trials, Vice reports.

All fish improved their time as the task was repeated. This finding suggests that the fish could learn from their environment and adjust accordingly. Not only does this show that fish can drive, but they can also adapt an ecosystem completely different from their own and move through it, reports Audrey Carleton for Vice.

“It shows that goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in. As anyone who has tried to learn how to ride a bike or to drive a car knows, it is challenging at first,” study author Shachar Givon, a graduate student at Ben-Gurion University, said in a statement. source

Israeli researchers say their fish – named after characters from Pride and Prejudice – reveal navigation is a universal ability

It might be an imaginary character straight out of a Dr Seuss book: The goldfish who could drive. But it’s real. Incredibly, Israeli researchers created a robotic car and report that they taught six fish – named after characters from Pride and Prejudice – to navigate it on land.

It’s all in the name of science, of course. The team had been dreaming up ways to test fish navigation for a while, according to Shachar Givon from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, first author of a study published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

“Recently, we even ventured out to the coral reef of Eilat in an ongoing attempt to study navigation on a larger, more natural scale,” she says. “So we are always trying to challenge ourselves – and our fish. The idea of having the fish navigate on land seemed exactly like the impossible sort of challenge we like to tackle. Lucky for us it was not so impossible after all.”

The technical term for their challenge is “domain transfer methodology”, which means exploring whether a species can perform tasks outside its own environment. To pull it off, they drew inspiration from work that taught rodents and dogs to use an automated vehicle to reach a target and a previously designed contraption, “Fish on Wheels”.

First, the team, led by Prof Ronen Segev, created a watery tank on wheels that moved in response to the movements and orientation of the fish. Then they set about teaching the goldfish (Carassius auratus) how to drive it – much like humans learn to ride a bike or drive a car.

The fish first had to connect their own swimming movements to the movements of the vehicle so they could navigate it. Then they were given a destination: a pink target board in a foreign room that elicited a food reward when the vehicle touched it. A computerised camera system attached to this “fish operated vehicle” recorded and translated the fish’s swimming directions.

After several days of training, the fish successfully navigated the vehicle to the target from different starting positions in the room – even if they faced obstacles like false targets or hitting a wall. Some did particularly well. “Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley are the two fish featured in the different videos and were total rock stars,” Givon says.

Although previous studies have shown that fish can navigate within aquatic environments, the authors suggest this study shows the ability to navigate – which is essential for animal survival in many domains including for finding food, shelter and mates – is universal to all species and independent of the environment.

“Since on the evolutionary scale our common ancestor is very, very far back,” Givon says, “finding that fish share navigational skills similar to our own really speaks volumes to the importance of these skills in the animal kingdom”.

By manipulating different variables, the team also showed that the fish used a combination of cues to navigate, including the target’s colour and location.

We clearly have a lot to learn from these unassuming little marine creatures. Although fish are the largest and most diverse group of vertebrates, Givon notes they receive relatively little attention from scientists – especially with regard to their cognitive skills.

However, there are suggestions that fish have rich capacities beyond our own for vision, hearing, tasting and smelling. They even appear to use electric signals to communicate with each other and may have self-awareness.

The new study has other ramifications for our perception of the maligned goldfish, Givon suggests. “Maybe, just maybe, we also managed to disprove the stigma around goldfish and three-second memory …”

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Israeli scientists teach goldfish to drive a robotic car on land

The test subjects were successfully trained to navigate a “fish-operated vehicle” past obstacles and to a target at the opposite end of a room in return for a fish food reward.

An old joke goes like this: Two fish are in a tank and one says, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

Israeli scientists appear to have found the answer.

A team from Ben-Gurion University has successfully taught goldfish to maneuver a robotic car on land, via a top-down camera that monitors their movements around a small fish tank.

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The camera in the “fish-operated vehicle” uses motion sensing technology to send a signal to one of its four wheels whenever a fish swims close to a side of the fish tank. Over time the fish learned that their movements would correspond to the movements of the vehicle.

The fish were successfully trained to reach a pink target at the opposite end of a room in return for a fish food reward — something they could do repeatedly and even with obstacles in their way.

The researchers say their study, published this month in the peer-reviewed Behavioral Brain Research journal, shows that the navigational abilities of fish stay intact in a land-based environment.

The process is called domain transfer methodology, when one species is placed in another’s environment and carries out an otherwise familiar task — in this case navigation. source