Fire at Will!

New research by scientists from the Universities of Oxford and Queensland has shown that Archerfish are able to learn and recognise human faces with a high degree of accuracy.

The discovery is startling considering that tropical fish have no evolutionary need for the ability, and lack the brain structure that gives us our own complex visual recognition capabilities. Indeed it was thought that the task was so complex that only primates, with their large and sophisticated brains, were able to accomplish it. Nevertheless, the amazing fish, with their correspondingly smaller bits of grey matter, were able to distinguish between even subtle differences in an array of human faces, picking out a single individual from up to 44 others.

While previous studies showed that damselfish can discriminate between the faces of their own species and those of a similar species and can even tell the difference between different individuals within their own species, this is the first time that the ability has been conclusively proved to extend to humans.

Famous for its ability to spit jets of water to shoot down airborne insects, the Archerfish was trained to spit at a particular face. They were then presented with a series of new faces, and stunned scientists with their ability to continually pick out the one they’d been trained to recognise.

Exactly why the fish were able to do this is still unknown, but it suggests that simple brains can perform complex tasks and that we humans may not be quite as special as we think we are...