It is believed that fish have a poor memory: supposedly they remember events for 3-10 seconds, no more. There is even a saying: “Memory is like a fish.” We checked whether the poor reputation of fish's ability to remember is justified.

If you search for information about the memory of fish in a search engine, you will definitely come up with the search sentence “memory like a fish’s joke.” And like this joke can be found by this query:

-You have a memory like a goldfish.
- Like what fish?
- Gold.
- Who is golden?

Research was carried out not only on goldfish, but also on other aquarium fish, such as African cichlids. Canadian scientists in 2014 provedthat these fish can not only be taught to eat in certain places in the aquarium. If, after three days of training, you take a 12-day “break” and then put the cichlids back in the same aquarium, they will remember these places and will spend time there waiting for feeding.

“In fact, most fish species on our planet today have gone through approximately the same development cycle as humans,” told in an interview with the BBC Calum Brown (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), one of the editors of the Journal of Fish Biology, dedicated to fish biology.

IN research, which Brown published in 2001, he noted that some fish are able to remember details for quite a long time. For example, the aquarium fish rainbowfish (Melanotaenia duboulayi) for about 11 months can remember the path along which it can escape from danger.

And guppies (Poecilia reticulata) can find a way out of a maze consisting of six consecutive forks, that is, remember them all. And they do this according to research 2017, in just five workouts.

But perhaps the most amazing memory is possessed by the squirrel (Toxotes chatareus). It uses water as a weapon or tool: it shoots a stream of water from its mouth, like a water pistol, and thus shoots down insects flying over the water. In this method of hunting, vision is very important for the splasher - with its help, the hunter determines the distance to the victim and can calculate the trajectory of the jet.

So, in research In 2016, it turned out that splashers can remember human faces. Among 44 new faces, they can identify a familiar one. The researchers trained them to shoot water at a face they recognized, and it turned out that the splashers identified it correctly 89% of the time.

In general, there are many experiments proving that fish's memory is not so bad. And the belief that these animals have a short memory is just a widespread misconception.