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What A Fish Knows, The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, Jonathan Balcombe, PhD

by Jennie Richards · Published July 1, 2019 · Updated August 6, 2021

“We have removed half of all marine life in the oceans since 1970. There has been a 50 percent decline in marine life populations between 1970 and 2012.” (WWF/RZS, Sept. 2015)

“It’s time to usher in a new relationship with fish, we need to start viewing animals not as a source of food, but as a source of beauty, and someone to respect, appreciate and protect. And have a better relationship going forward.”

Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a PhD in ethology—the study of animal behavior. In this lecture, he explores the world of fish and shares the latest in science about their cognitive, emotional, and social capabilities. Balcombe is considered the one of the pre-eminent experts on fish and the sentience of animals, and currently serves as Director of Animal Sentience with the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy. He is also the Department Chair for Animal Studies with Humane Society University in Washington, D.C., and serves as the Associate Editor for the journal Animal Sentience.

In this presentation, Balcombe explains how we still continue to have a strange and very limited understanding and perception of fishes – “we either see them in one of two ways, either as a source of food or as pleasure and recreation. So engrained is fishing as a sentimental, acceptable part of our culture, that it’s gratuitously used as all that is good about North America.” But Balcombe shows us how science and technology have been revealing some remarkable aspects of the lives of fishes in recent years because of technical advances, that are challenging our prejudices and biases we have developed about fishes in the past.

In this lecture, Balcombe shows us fish through a new and different lens. A truly fascinating one.

Video Length: 59 Minutes

Video Published: October 2016

More About Jonathan Balcombe, PhD

Balcombe is the author of four popular science books on the inner lives of animals, including Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, and What A Fish Knows—A New York Times bestseller. He has published over 60 scientific papers and book chapters on animal behavior and animal protection. He serves as the Associate Editor for the journal Animal Sentience, and he teaches a course on animal sentience for a graduate institute.

Visit Jonathan Balcombe’s website.

More about the book, What A Fish Knows

Review of What A Fish Knows, by All Creatures

All Books by Jonathan Balcombe

Jonathan Balcombe, The Inner Lives of Animals

What Do Fishes Perceive?

Fish probably invented all the senses that we are familiar with – vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. They are also almost certainly the inventors of color vision, they see the world more vividly and brilliantly than we do.
Some fishes, like cave fishes, have lived in caves for thousands of years, and as a result have lost their vision but they have learned to navigate very effectively in the dark.
Fish can recognize each other’s faces, they can identify each other with a ‘face print’ like a covert facial recognition system. Fish can also recognize human faces.
Fish are very perceptive and have very good memories.

Cognition in Fishes – What Do They Think?

Fish have a very decent brain. They develop and use tools to accomplish tasks. They have observational learning abilities – they can learn to become quite proficient at a task without doing it themselves, just through observational learning.
Fishes can perform certain cognitive skills even much better than humans. Certain fish can memorize typography, they have a strong sense of the orientation of distances, they have a knowledge of high and low tides, and are highly accurate at jumping tide pools landing exactly where they target using their spacial memories.
Fish have the basic raw materials to do what we can do and experience what mammals and humans experience. They are very comparable.

Do Fish Feel Pain?

There has been a scientific debate as to whether fishes feel pain in years past. But the majority of scientific opinion today strongly confirms that fish do feel pain–-mechanical pain, heat pain, chemical pain, and they remember pain and are distracted by pain. Fish have pain receptors and pain receiving signals that they do feel pain. They also seek to relieve their pain.
So who is sentient and who is not? The line must be drawn with a pencil, because with new scientific evidence coming out all the time – there is a growing number of sentient beings including a expanding number of invertebrates (animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column like mollusks, crabs, lobsters, octopuses, shrimp insects, spiders, crustaceans, starfish) that are showing sentience.

For more, see the book by Victoria Braithwaite: Do Fish Feel Pain?

Read: It’s Official: Fish Feel Pain, by Smithsonian.com

Read the article, Do Fish Suffer? by Scientific American

The Social Lives of Fish

Fish know each other as individuals.
If a fish lives with a human, then of course they will recognize them. Humans are a source of social stimulation for them.
The disadvantages of fishes as animals, is that they don’t often trigger our own human empathy – they don’t blink, their eyes are located on the side instead of the front of their head, and they make a lot of sounds underwater but we don’t generally hear them.
Fish have Cooperative Vigilance – Some reef dweller fishes work in pairs to protect themselves from dangers; they team up to support each other. One fish will watch out vigilantly while the other fish eats, then they swap out these roles. They work together and make self-sacrifices for the benefit of the other.
Fish are Cooperative Hunters – Groupers have been observed teaming up with eels to cooperatively hunt for food. The success of finding food is much higher if they team together, than if they work individually, so this works well for them.
Fish experience Courtships – Some fish have very elaborate courtship exercises. They have over 32 described mating systems. Puffer fish create beautiful, elaborate sculptures on the floor of the ocean to attract the female, these structures or sculptures are aesthetically beautiful.

Fish Feel Pleasure

After researching fish for 4.5 years, I have become convinced that fish deserve equal moral consideration to all the other vertebrate animals.
Cleaner fish, these fish work to clean other fish. It’s a social contract, they clean parasites off fish, while the fish are being cleaned they enjoy the sensation, and likewise the cleaner fish get food this way.
There’s now evidence that fishes enjoy being caressed. Fish will swim up to scuba divers to be stroked. They love it.
Sharks – There are more and more friends of sharks today that are trying to help them. Divers often see very large fishing hooks in sharks’ mouths. These are painful hooks embedded in their faces—often for years. The divers will dive to help the sharks and cut the hooks out of their mouths. They are very intelligent creatures and know that someone is helping them.

Fish Sentience

I’m convinced that fish have complex and rich lives. They belong fully in the vertebrate camp.
We tend to diminish them, and seem to hold them in lower esteem than other vertebrates, but we are truly doing a big disservice to them.
We simply cannot remove more fish from the oceans than we already have, our oceans are so depleted. There has been 100 million tons of commercial extinction, the profit margin is not worth the effort to catch them because fish stocks are so depleted.
Estimates are that we catch and kill from 150 billion a year to 2.9 trillion a year.
It’s easy to forget they are all individuals.
It’s very cruel and inhumane that we cast fish back into the ocean—millions of fish per day—as “by-catch” that are dying and dead. They are just wasted. Individual lives.
There are a number of other ways we harm fishes – in the aquarium trade, fishes die during the collection process, fishes die in transit—only about 10% make it and many aquarium people don’t even know how to care for them. These fishes used for aquariums live from two to 15 meters deep in the ocean and then we put them into a shallow aquarium, which is totally unsuitable for them.

Fish Are Sentient and Emotional Beings and Clearly Feel Pain, Psychology Today

About Fish Sentience, Fish Feel