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Like Fish

I took advantage of a no meeting afternoon recently to go to the pool. It was pretty empty at that odd middle of the workday hour. A few elderly people - maybe retirees, a couple of young mothers teaching their preschoolers to swim, a child being instructed one on one by a swim coach and then me. After a while, I found myself thinking how all of  us in the water were not so different from fish in an aquarium. 

The difference is that the fish naturally inhabit water and their world is forcibly constrained into a tank. For us humans its a way to get some exercise in an environment we had to be taught to work with. But the back and forth is much like the fish - there is no end game other than doing the laps and keeping at it for a period of time. Just that, we have the agency to get out of the water on to dry land and on with our lives. Fish stay there pacing the water for as long as they live. 

But whether fish actually feel bored in a way we can relate to is harder to work out. Fish-keepers sometimes see their pets ‘glass surfing’ – swimming repeatedly up and down the glass of the tank. This could be the aquatic equivalent of the pacing of a captive tiger that’s bored from a lack of stimulation. But the fish could also be stressed from an overcrowded or unfamiliar tank.

It would be great if this fleeting moment of empathy for fish could result in more lasting  outcomes. In the least it made me want to understand what it might be like to be a fish stuck in a tank entertaining humans. 

In that study, scientists observed a striped species of fish known as the cleaner wrasse. They placed a colored mark on the fish’s throat, which it would only be able to see in its reflection. They noticed that the fish used the mirror to check out the mark and then tried to remove the mark by scraping its body. It appeared to recognize itself, thus passing the test for self-awareness. 
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