Archerfish are already stars of the animal kingdom for their stunning spit-takes. They shoot high-powered water jets from their mouths to stun prey, making them one of a few fish known to use tools.
But by training Toxotes chatareus to direct those jets of spit at certain individuals, scientists have shown that the little guys have another impressive skill: They seem to be able to distinguish one human face from another, something never before witnessed in fish and spotted just a few times in non-human animals.
The results, published Tuesday in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, could help us understand how humans got so good at telling each other apart.
It’s generally accepted that the fusiform gyrus, a brain structure located in the neocortex, allows humans to tell one another apart with a speed and accuracy that other species can’t manage. But there’s some debate over whether human faces are so innately complex — and that distinguishing them is more difficult than other tricks of memory or pattern recognition — that this region of the brain is a necessary facilitator of the skill that evolved especially for it. Birds, which have been shown to distinguish humans from one another, have the same structure. But some researchers still think that facial recognition might be something that humans learn — it’s not an innate skill — and that the fusiform gyrus is just the spot where we happen to process all the necessary information.
That’s where fish come in: They don’t have anything like this structure within their (relatively) simple brains. But they’ve been trained to spit at particular shapes or colors before, so Cait Newport, research fellow in zoology at Oxford University, wanted to see whether faces posed a challenge for fish brains.
And based on the spits she monitored, they don’t.
“It’s very similar to training a pet dog,” said Newport, who conducted the research along with scientists from the University of Queensland. First she taught archerfish that spitting at a cursor she moved around on a screen would result in food pellets. Then she taught them to spit at pictures of human faces — and then she taught them to spit at a particular face, even when given options. In two experiments — each using four fish — the subjects were presented with a random sequence of 44 faces in addition to the one they’d been trained to pick. In both cases (including an experiment where the researchers made the faces gray-scale) the fish made better than random guesses, obtaining average accuracies of 81 percent and 86 percent.
“Obviously the first takeaway is that they could do it. They were distinguishing something really complicated,” Newport said. “It certainly challenges the whole idea of a fish with a 30 second memory.”
There’s no doubt that whatever mechanism humans use for recognizing one another is much more sophisticated than the recognition Newport saw in archerfish. “We may even find that fish aren’t able to do it in other conditions,” she said. She plans on testing the limits of archerfish abilities in future studies.
“But this does start to suggest that there’s nothing special about human faces, and that they can be treated as any other object and still be recognized,” she said, which further suggests that facial recognition is learned. Again, this doesn’t mean the fusiform gyrus isn’t important — irregularities there have been linked to a condition called face blindness, which prevents humans from recognizing individuals — but it could mean that the human ability boils down to more than just some unique brain matter we’ve evolved to carry.
“This is just the scratching of the surface,” Newport said. “It’s hard to say what it might mean.”
So be kind to any spitting fish you meet. Because they might remember you.
