“Like frogs, trout can’t possibly have any idea what we are, or what a fishing line is, or what an artificial fly is. Nor do they associate us in any way with the lures at the end of our lines, or have any reason or ability to “suspect” them. They certainly haven’t got the cognitive horsepower to perceive our fly as afake. In fact, they don’t have “ideas” at all. In other words, in the terms we use to describe human intelligence, fish aren’t smart.”

What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and other Fly-fishing Myths

http://midcurrent.com/books/what-trout-want-a-beautiful-fiction/

The concept of trout being able to reason and remember has always been fascinating to me.

About thirty years ago Peter Mckenzie Philps, who ran a fly fishing mail order company in England, recounted a fascinating tale in one of his catalogues.

He had a dam on his property which was fed via a pipe which ran under a bridge. From a certain vantage point and in the right light one could see the trout that congregated at the point where the water ran out of the pipe and into the dam.

Peter used these trout for an experiment.

He would let flies of different colours be carried by the current through the pipe and into the dam. Sooner or later one of the trout would take the fly and be reeled through the pipe to be released much lower down in the dam.

On every occasion if the same fly that had previously hooked a trout was fed back into the dam, the trout would ignore it.

If, however, a different fly of a different colour was allowed to drift through the pipe the result would be another hooked trout.

From this one could deduce that some form of recognition/communication and association with danger was occurring.

I have seen two examples of fish being able to recognise and associate certain actions and occurrence with food.

The first was in a shop in Cape Town which specialised in bass fishing. On one side of the shop the owner had a fish tank with a bass in it. On the other side of the shop was another fish tank containing small bluegill. When the owner picked up a small scoop net and walked towards the bluegill tank the bass literally shivered in anticipation. When the bluegill hit the water it was gone in a split-second blur of movement - too fast to follow.

The second was when I visited the trout hatchery of Rhodes University ichthyologist, Martin Davies in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.

Martin Davies  with Alan Hatton (FOSAF archives picture)

The hatchery is unusual because it runs off tap water but it has the normal portapools containing trout in different stages of development.

Martin was very specific in feeding the fish with pellets taken from a red plastic bowel because he believes that the trout will continue to retain a memory of red being associated with food and, so he said, all his flies include red in the dressing to take advantage of this fact. There was no doubt that when Martin picked up the red bowl within the visionary range of the trout, they responded with Pavlovian intensity.

Another question that has always fascinated me is: how long does it take for a pricked fish to start feeding again?

Gary LaFontaine in ‘The Dry Fly – New Angles’ (Greycliffe Publishing, 1990)  speaks of an experiment he conducted on his home stream, Salmon Brook in Connecticut in 1957. He sat on a hill with binoculars and watched a procession of fly anglers fish the pool and move on. He then did the same thing in 1982.

“One difference in 1982 was that there were many more anglers: in roughly nineteen hours of weekend observation, I studied a total of twenty one fly fishermen. They all affected the natural feeding activity, putting most of the trout down for twenty minutes. (my emphasis). Some luckless fishermen, entering the pool on the heels of the last flogger, never had a chance to cast to a receptive target. Not one person sat and rested the water before beginning to fish.”

I had two experiences which enabled me to put a time frame to how long it takes a frightened fish to resume feeding. Both were wild fish, one a brown trout and the other a rainbow.

The first occurred on the Witte stream about a two-hour drive from Cape Town.

You can get an idea of the conditions from these articles: http://www.tomsutcliffe.co.za/fly-fishing/friend-s-articles/item/185-a-day-on-the-witte.html

http://www.nightjartravel.com/fly-fishing/witte-river

I was standing in the stream, leaning against a rock which had a convenient ledge and I decided it was a good time to have a soft drink and a sandwich which I duly packed out on the ledge. It was then that I spotted a brown trout  of about ten inches feeding hard in the run ahead of me. My cast was good and the fish took the fly instantly. I struck too quickly, felt a momentary resistance and the pricked fish spend downstream towards me, taking up station about two metres away against the opposite bank. I noted the time and waited, quietly enjoying my refreshments.

Click to enlarge

A Witte River brown trout (Photo per Stanton Hector)

After 12 minutes the trout swam upstream and resumed its previous position. My cast was bad and the fly landed about a foot ahead of it but slightly to the side. I was going to let the fly drift back to me before trying another cast when it suddenly shot across and took my fly. I released it 14 minutes after first hooking it.

Ed Herbst on the Holsoot River

The second occasion was when I was fishing a #18 beadhead PTN on the Holsloot stream near Worcester which contains rainbow trout. When the strike indicator hesitated I struck – too hard as always – and the 6x tippet popped. I sat down, cut the leader back to 5x, tied on an identical fly and cast to the same spot. Again the strike indicator hesitated but this time the tippet held and when I brought the fish, a rainbow of about ten inches, to hand it had two PTNs in its mouth, both originating in my fly box. I doubt if five minutes had elapsed between the two strikes.

http://www.trouthaven.co.za/trout-fishing

Obviously this depends on the size of the fish and the conditions and research in New Zealand indicates that big trout on remote and rarely-fished rivers can stop feeding for a day or two after the stress of catch and release.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/IT'S+TROUT+WHO+ARE+FLY%3B+Fish+learn+to+dodge+anglers,+says+study.-a064516510

This brings us back to the original question – can trout learn from experience?

Bob Wyatt believes not as the quote which anchors this article indicates.

However a recent article on Midcurrent seems to provide evidence to the contrary.

http://midcurrent.com/science/you-live-and-learn-or-you-dont-live-long/

So too does a Wikipedia article on fish intelligence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_intelligence

I would like to proffer two examples of a trout’s ability to relate objects to danger.

The first was a story which Tom Sutcliffe tells of he and Fred Steynberg sitting on the bank of a New Zealand river using a black permanent marker to change the colour of their orange egg-yarn strike indicators which were clearly frightening the trout.

The second comes from a chapter by Neil Patterson in the book ‘The Flies That Catch Fish’ by Chris Sandford and friends ( Medlar Press, 2009).  In an article on a fly he calls the ‘Red Spot Shrimp’ Patterson explains that adding a gold bead to the pattern resulted in instant and constant refusals. He proved this with back-to-back experiments: “Bead on, bead off. Bead off preferred.”

http://troutlegend.com/forum/river-patterns-and-discussion/river-bug/

I would like to proffer an insight from a personal experience during my days as a reporter with the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s television news office in Sea Point, Cape Town.

Around 1979 a small article appeared in a local newspaper, the Cape Argus. It seemed that a local pet shop had been approached by someone who was moving away from the area and offered, at no cost, a goldfish. The goldfish had been born with a spinal defect which left it with a U shape which hampered its swimming ability. More out of charity than anything else the pet shop owner accepted the fish and popped it into a tank with other fish. However, after a while he noticed something which seemed surpassing strange. When he fed the fish in the tank with flakes there would be a piscine melee as they jostled to get to the food first. The crippled fish was quite literally handicapped in this regard – until another fish, always the same fish, manoeuvred itself beneath the fish with the deformed spine and pushed it to the surface so that it, too, could have reasonable access to the food. Then, and only then, would it feed as well. The photograph showed the pet shop owner peering into the fish tank and a close up of the disabled gold fish.

The pet shop was only a few blocks away so we set off. I interviewed the pet shop owner, the process was shot from various angles and showed unequivocally that what was claimed was true. We edited the story and fed it to the SABC headquarters in Johannesburg and I must admit that I did not give it any further thought.

That is, until orders for the story poured in from all over the world. What was astounding to us – and keep in mind that this was in the middle of the Cold War – was that the biggest order, or so I was told by colleagues in Johannesburg, came from Russia. At the time the South African government was portraying Soviet Russia as evil incarnate and they weren’t exactly exchanging Xmas cards so the story clearly had a universal appeal which ignored the political divide.

Can fish empathise? Do fish empathise?

Not if you believe Bob Wyatt…..

What I glean from Simon Blanford’s fascinating article is that it pays to give trout the benefit of the doubt and competition fly fishers cleave to a simply verity – a spooked fish is a fish you are unlikely to catch.

Well not immediately anyway …..

Ed Herbst

Simon Blanford, a biologist living in Pennsylvania, kindly responds to Ed’s article.

You provide some excellent examples in this very interesting article. Particularly fascinating is the anecdote about the 'disabled' goldfish and its helper.

It seems people fall between two extremes when it comes to thinking about how bright fish are. As you point out, at one end there's Bob Wyatt's level of 'personal incredulity'. He's unable to imagine that a lowly fish can have surprisingly sophisticated cognitive abilities. At the other end are those who appear to subscribe to some kind of Disneyfication of wildlife - fish are all like Nemo, we just don't understand their language. On the whole fishermen ably avoid the latter trap because we actually interact with the slippery, scaly, cold-blooded and sometimes slimy protagonists.

The trouble with Wyatt's assessment is that he conflates how we view the world with how another, nonhuman animal views the world. There is no reason to think that a fish has to be able to have "ideas", or that they should be classified as "smart" or "dumb" on the same scale as we judge ourselves. It is a common mistake and as a palliative I often point people to a famous essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel - "What's it like to be a bat?" (Freely available here - http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf.).

The essay is a bit heavy for a quick read but it very ably points out the problem with assuming that other animals can be understood on our own terms. 

That said, the simple process of learning from one's mistakes applies to fish just as much as it applies to us, dogs, aardvarks or, perhaps surprisingly, mosquitoes. Even these much-vilified insects can rapidly learn to avoid landing on a surface from which they've previously received a mild electric shock. The fundamental nature of “aversion learning” (the sort of experience a fish has to being caught) across a huge range of animals, does allow parallels to be drawn between our response (remember to use the handle when picking up a scalding hot cup of tea) with a fish’s response to being caught even if we cannot know, as Nagel points out, how they actually experience the event. So there really is no serious debate about whether fish can learn and remember and the fact that they can is supported by a wealth of evidence. Of course fish make mistakes. But it is just as we do, when they are hungry, stressed, have to make complicated choices and when the learning task is not reinforced with sufficient frequency.

More nebulous is the area of assigning ‘emotions’, like empathy or remorse or loss, to fish. What possible fitness benefit can one goldfish gain from helping a crippled neighbour? Research hasn’t come to any conclusion about empathy or remorse (both have been suggested from experiments with rats) or loss in fish but currently tends towards fish having some sort of conscious awareness. Though if this is true, it’s probably awareness unlike anything we might recognise.

See Simon’s article ‘Do fish have personalities?’ on the MidCurrent website at: http://midcurrent.com/science/do-fish-have-personalities