Soon, scientists found that zebrafish, a model organism in biological research, is also a very smart animal, which can complete various tasks. In 2002, several researchers from the University of Toledo, Ohio, tested the memory ability of zebrafish. During the training, they will give zebra fish a red light as a signal before feeding. After 10 days of training suspension, zebrafish still remembers the red light signal indicating that it is time to eat. In the laboratory, zebrafish can also quickly learn how to walk a maze, find food according to sound signals, remember the shape of predators, and avoid electric shocks according to tips.
Interestingly, zebrafish and humans have similar memory characteristics. For these small fish, too much pressure will make them unable to remember things, and distraction will also reduce learning efficiency [8]. The memory ability of zebrafish will also gradually decline with age. Long-term memory is not impossible.
So, will fish have a stronger memory, such as remembering one thing for several years? Related academic research is very limited, because many kinds of fish can't live that long, and a few years is really too long for a graduate student who is eager to publish a paper. However, there are also some unofficial observations that some fish may indeed have long-term memories.
In other countries in the world, it is generally believed that fish only have a memory of 7 seconds (or 3 seconds). According to research by Ashley Ward of the University of Sydney, this sentence comes from an advertisement. But perhaps because of the long history, the exact source is hard to find. Ward also believes that early zoologists used overly complicated methods to test the memory ability of fish. These tasks suitable for human intelligence test are obviously too difficult for fish, so the experimental fish left a poor record, which may be one of the reasons for this myth. In a word, all the studies on the memory of fish show that the memory of fish is far more than 7 seconds.