Fish Are Capable Of Play

By Leonard Ho

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From the University of Tennessee:

UT Study Finds Fish Just Wanna Have Fun

Fish just want to have fun, according to a UT study that finds even fish “play.”

The research is published in the academic journal Ethology and can be viewed at the journal’s website.

Gordon Burghardt, a professor in the departments of Psychology and Ecology are Evolutionary Biology, is known for defining “play” in a way that allows us to identify it in species not previously thought capable of play, such as wasps, reptiles and invertebrates.

“Play is repeated behavior that is incompletely functional in the context or at the age in which it is performed and is initiated voluntarily when the animal or person is in a relaxed or low-stress setting,” said Burghardt.

He and his colleagues Vladimir Dinets, a psychology research assistant professor, and James Murphy of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, are the first to document play with objects in a cichlid fish species. There are hundreds of species of cichlid, including tilapia, but the behavior of the species they studied appears unique.

The team studied and filmed three …read more

Read more here: Advanced Aquarist