Scientists in Israel train goldfish to drive on land

Goldfish are shown in this file photo. (AP / Chitose Suzuki)

A team of scientists in Israel built a “Fish Operated Vehicle” and taught six goldfish to drive on land.

“Overall, this study suggests that fish can learn to control a vehicle and use simple navigation strategies to successfully perform a task,” the researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev wrote in a paper published this month in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

Their Fish Operated Vehicle, or FOV for short, consists of a plexiglass water tank outfitted with four motorized wheels as well as a camera to track the fishes’ movement, a computer, and LIDAR technology to detect the FOV’s location.

“The vehicle was designed to detect the fish's position in the water tank and react by activating the wheels such that the vehicle moved in the specific direction according to the fish's position,” the researchers from the university’s life sciences, biomedical engineering, computer science and neuroscience departments explained. “In this way, the vehicle's reaction to the fish's position allowed the fish to drive.”

After becoming accustomed to their new ride and environment, the fish eventually learned to navigate towards a pink target in a three-by-four metre room, which would earn them a food pellet reward.

“The fish became progressively more proficient on the task and by the last session exhibited control of the FOV and a high level of success,” the study reported. “The fish improved in terms of the total number of food pellet rewards during the session and the direct routes to the target.”

The scientists then upped the ante by changing the start position, adding decoy targets in different colours and moving the pink target around, which the goldfish kept driving towards to get their tasty treat.

The researchers trained six goldfish to drive, albeit one at a time – which means no FOV in the HOV. And far from being a fishy Ferrari, the FOV jerkily travels at speeds of just over 1.5 km/h. If you want to build your own, they even published detailed instructions.

Previous cute experiments show dogs and rats operating customized cars. The team from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev acknowledge they weren’t the first to create a fish operated vehicle either, with a similar device driving in the Netherlands in 2014. The difference here is that building on previous work, the scientists in Israel taught their goldfish to repeatedly drive towards a target as a means of testing another species’ ability to navigate alien terrain.

“Further studies are needed to extend these findings to more complex scenery such as an open terrestrial environment,” they wrote, raising future fears of fish on freeways. “The findings nevertheless suggest that 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.”