These fish know when you look at them

These fish can see when you’re staring

By Gennaro Tomma edited by Andrea Thompson

Do you know that uncomfortable feeling of being watched? A new study shows that fish also seem to know when they – or their children – are being stared at, and that they don’t like it. The work, published Tuesday i Royal Society Open Science, rarely gives insight into the mind of the fish.

Previous research has suggested that some primates, domestic animals and birds appear to have what is called attentional attribution – the ability to perceive where another individual is focused. “It means distinguishing not only who is present, but what the individual notices,” says study author Shun Satoh, a fish biologist at Kyoto University in Japan.

To see if fish might have this ability, the team went to Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa to conduct various experiments on the emperor cichlid (Boulengerochromis microlepis), a species that is neither too afraid of nor too aggressive towards humans. Using waterproof cameras, the team recorded how adult fish guarding their offspring behaved when a diver looked at the fish’s eggs or its newly hatched young, looked in another direction or looked at the fish itself. The researchers also observed what happened when the diver turned 180 degrees from the nest.

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An analysis of the recordings showed that the parents behaved aggressively towards the divers more often when the human intruders were staring at the offspring or the parent, compared to when the diver was looking in another direction or turned away completely.

Although the authors acknowledge that the study is preliminary, the results suggest that “the fish not only respond to a diver’s presence, but also to cues related to where the diver’s attention is directed,” Satoh says.

The study is a great starting point for answering whether fish have attentional attribution, says Gabrielle Davidson, a behavioral ecologist at the University of East Anglia in England, who was not involved in the work. “Animals are so sensitive to eye-like stimuli that we would expect them to find the gaze threatening or scary if it was directed at them,” she says. However, the study appears to go a step further by showing that the fish may be able to track where the diver is looking. “It’s not just a reflexive response to the eyes being right on them.”

Davidson believes this ability may be widespread in other fish species, but she adds that more research is needed to find out if the fish are actually looking at the diver’s gaze or if they are responding to other signals.

“One of the biggest challenges is knowing what’s in the minds of other animals,” she says. “These kinds of additional relationships and experiments can take us a step forward in revealing the inner understanding of these animals.”

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