It is believed that the fish have bad memory: supposedly they remember events for 3-10 seconds, no more. There is even a saying: "Memory is like a fish." We checked whether such a disastrous reputation of fish ability to memorize is justified.

If you look for information about the memory of fish on the search engine, a “memory like a joke” will certainly fall out. And so joke You can find at this request:

- You have a memory like a goldfish.
- How is the fish?
- Golden.
- Who is gold?

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

“In fact, most species of fish on our planet today have passed about the same time in the development cycle as a person” - told In an interview with BBC Kalem Brown (University of Maccuori, Sydney, Australia), one of the editors of Journal of Fish Biology, dedicated to fish biology.

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

And Guppy (Poecilia Reticulata) can find a way out of the labyrinth consisting of six consecutive forks, that is, remember them all. Moreover, they do this, according to research 2017, in just five training.

But perhaps the most amazing memory is the mourney (toxotes cheatareus). He uses water as a weapon or tool: he produces a stream of water from his mouth, as from a water pistol, and thus knocks down insects flying above the water. In this method of hunting for spraying, vision is very important - including with its help the hunter determines the distance to the victim and can calculate the jet trajectory.

So, in research 2016 it turned out that mudgunes can memorize human faces. Among 44 new faces, they can determine the familiar. Researchers taught them to let the stream of water in the face that they know, and it turned out that the sprayers determine it accurately in 89% of cases.

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