Do fish play?

[MSilvia]

True... it doesn't mean it isn't either. Since it neither means it is or that it isn't, it seems to me that something more substantial than "it looks like it's having fun" should be used to determine what a behavior means.

I think looking at behaviors in comparison to similar known behaviors in other animals is a good start. I mentioned the garabaldi because the looping and pushing behaviors described earlier reminded of me of another fish that did the same things for a non-play reason.

I personally haven't seen fish do anything that couldn't be explained in terms of a basic instinct like feeding, self-preservation, territoriality, mating, etc. On the other hand, I've seen octopi and mammals engage in creative complex behaviors unlike what I've seen in fish. I think creativity requires high order cognition, and play in turn requires creativity.

I don't think play is universal in the animal kingdom, though it may be in mammals. I'm pretty sure I've never seen any behavior that I would interpret as ant, urchin, coral, barnacle, amoeba, clam, or worm play. Have you?

 

[WreckWriter]

Originally posted by MSilvia
I'm pretty sure I've never seen any behavior that I would interpret as ant, urchin, coral, barnacle, amoeba, clam, or worm play. Have you?

Nope, you got me there!

Tom

 

[MSilvia]

One time, while diving the wreck of Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand, I had a small tropical fish I didn't recognise school with me. It stayed a few inches from the right hand corner of my mask for the entire dive.

It seemed very playful, but I'm still hesitant to say it was having fun and not just responding to a "school with something" instinct.

In any case, it was really cool!

 

[Uncle Pug]

Roland Anderson of the Seattle Aquarium has written an article about the play behaviour exhibited by the Giant Pacific Octopus...

 

[MSilvia]

Thanks for the reference Uncle Pug. In addition to the following article, I found that at the Seattle Aquarium, octopi are the only non-mammals that are given names. They feel that they are smart and individualistic enough to "deserve them".

From http://www.discover.com/nov_issue/breakoctoplay.html

Octopuses are the geniuses of the invertebrate world. They can navigate mazes, unscrew jars, and escape into neighboring tanks to feed. And now it seems that octopuses are even smart enough to have fun. Roland Anderson, a marine biologist at the Seattle Aquarium, and Jennifer Mather, an animal behaviorist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, were surprised to find that octopuses play. Birds and mammals engage in all sorts of play: cats bat at string; birds appear to soar for the sheer joy of it. Invertebrates, however, were thought to lack the sophistication to play, or as a scientist might define it, "to engage in repetitive behavior unrelated to food gathering or reproduction." Anderson had heard colleagues casually mention that octopuses seemed to like floating thermometers. "I happened to have a bottle of Tylenol that I was about done with, so we filled it with water and glued it shut," he says. When he put the pill bottle into a tank with an octopus, the octopus first brought the bottle to its mouth, in case it might be food. Then it gently pushed the bottle away with a squirt of water, directing it toward a current that brought it back toward the octopus. When the bottle returned, the octopus squirted it away again. One of the eight octopuses tested played with the bottle for nearly half an hour. Anderson says that octopuses will squirt water at objects that annoy them, "but then they blow quite hard." If that doesn't work, he says, the octopus might attack the object. That the octopuses repeatedly directed gentle squirts at the bottle, says Anderson, "is an indication that this might be play behavior."

 

[DuckDive]

I've read somewhere that 'sentience' is defined as being 'self-aware'. For example, if an animal can discover that it's reflection in a mirror is itself, it is classed as self-aware.

Dunno about octopuses, but dolphins are certainly self-aware. Fish don't seem to be though.

Maybe there's a connection between animals that are self-aware and animals that play?

 

[MSilvia]

I would be suprised if octopuses were found to not be self aware. They are very intelligent, and can perform complex problem solving tasks. I remember seeing a documentary once where an octopus was given a lobster in a closed jar that had a hole just large enough to get a tentacle into. It took the octopus several minutes, but it finally figured out that it couldn't get the lobster out through the hole, and then figured out how to unscrew the lid. The next time the octopus was given a similar jar, it wasted no time unscrewing it and starting it's meal. It seemed to have simply figured out how screw top jars work, and retained the knowledge.