Teaching a fish to drive

You may have heard that slam: “Just like a fish needs a bicycle.” It is possible that some fish might get vehicles with more than 2 wheels. The team at Ben-Gurion University developed an FOV – a Fish Operated Vehicle. The robotic car is fitted with lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to collect data on the vehicle’s ground location and the fish’s whereabouts inside a mounted water tank. A computer, camera, electric motors and omni-wheels give the fish control of the vehicle. “Surprisingly, it doesn’t take the fish a long time to learn how to drive the vehicle. They’re confused at first. They don’t know what’s going on but they’re very quick to realize that there is a correlation between their movement and the movement of the machine that they’re in,” said researcher Shachar Givon.

Six goldfish, each receiving around 10 driving lessons, took part in the study. Each time one of them reached a target set by the researchers, it was rewarded with food. A weird new video shows a goldfish driving a water-filled, motorized “car” from one end of a room to another, bobbing and weaving to avoid obstacles along the way. Scientists performed the odd experiment to better understand how goldfish navigate terrestrial environments. In the wild, goldfish and many other species must navigate to find food or shelter for survival. But it is not always clear how these animals learn to navigate a space and, for fish, whether the brain networks that allow them to navigate a coral reef would be of any use on land. What better way to explore animal navigation in a foreign environment than to literally take a fish out of water?

Piscatorial punchlines

What is stranger than seeing a cat fish?
Seeing a goldfish bowl.

I have six goldfish named Major, Minor, Flat Nine, Bebop, Altered, and Blues.
The only way I can tell them apart is by their scales.

Two goldfish are in a tank.
One says to the other, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

Two goldfish are in a tank.
One says to the other, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

January 12th Birthdays

1955 – Kirstie Alley, 1985 – Issa Rey, 1984 – Jessie Graff, 1968 – Racheal Harris

1951 – Rush Limbaugh,  1930 – Tim Horton,  1977 – Piolo Pascual, 1988 – Andrew Lawrence

Morning Motivator:

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/like-fish-out-water-israeli-team-trains-goldfish-drive-2022-01-10/