Wild Fish Can Recognize Humans

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On occasion, Undercurrent readers have written in their reader reports that when they return to a spot to dive, the fish seem to recognize them. While one might get a little suspicious of divers who claim a fish recognizes them a year later, if you dive the same spot for a few days, you may be right.

For years, scientists at the Max Planck Harvard Mediterranean Research Center noticed fish would follow specific divers, usually those who had previously fed them, while ignoring others. The fish didn't just beg indiscriminately; they seemed to recognize individual humans. To test this, researchers conducted controlled experiments to determine if the fish actually differentiated between humans based on visual cues. "Do wild fish have the capacity or motivation to recognize us?" asked Maëlan Tomasek, a doctoral student at the Institute....

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