Does Your Fish Recognize Your Face?

Your dog waits eagerly for you to get home so that he can greet you. Your cat may allow you to pet her if she’s feeling friendly enough. Your hamster definitely knows the hand that feeds it, but what about your pet fish? Does your fish know who you are? Can it recognize your face?

Considering that fish do not have the visual cortex that humans have to allow them to recognize faces, one would think that your pet fish would be unable to know you. Researchers at the University of Oxford  conducted an experiment using archerfish that would prove otherwise.

A tropical species, archerfish can shoot jets of water at it’s prey. The researchers used this property of the fish to train them to squirt water at one of the two face images that they were shown. The fish were shown the one familiar face along with 44 new ones and coaxed into squirting one.

Apparently the science experiment was conducted twice and the archerfish were seen to accurately recognize and squirt the known face image 80 percent of the time. Even recognizing the face when some details of the face, such as color and overall shape, were altered. This was a surprise to the researchers.