Science & Technology

Scientists train goldfish to drive a 'car' around a room

By T.K. Randall
January 5, 2022

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Developed by a group of scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, the bizarre 'car' (or 'fish operated vehicle') is essentially a tank of water on wheels that the fish can 'drive' around on land.

By teaching six goldfish to use the vehicle, the researchers noted that they had demonstrated the capacity for a fish to transfer its navigational skills from a marine environment to a terrestrial one.

According to the study, the fish "were able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target, regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies."

The experiment mirrored previous efforts to assess the navigational skills of other animals."The way space is represented in the fish brain and the strategies it uses may be as successful in a terrestrial environment as they are in an aquatic one," the researchers wrote.

"This hints at universality in the way space is represented across environments."

To 'drive' the tank, the fish simply had to swim in a particular direction.

Over time, some of them went from taking 30 minutes to find the target to just under a minute.

I am excited to share a new study led by Shachar Givon & @MatanSamina w/ Ohad Ben Shahar: Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land. We trained goldfish to drive a wheeled platform that reacts to the fish's movement (https://t.co/ZR59Hu9sib). pic.twitter.com/J5BkuGlZ34

— Ronen Segev (@ronen_segev) January 3, 2022

Source: Times of Israel

Tags: Fish