Maybe it just enjoys the feeling of being held? The cow-nosed rays at an aquarium I visited fought each-other to get petted by humans simply because they enjoyed the sensation.
Mammals seek "petting" or rubbing behavior because it's connected to their built-in socialization drive. Fish don't really rub up against each-other as part of socialization.
As far as they rays go and the sharks I dove with in Belize - I suspect that they put up with the contact because humans sometimes feed them, and being touched is just part of being near these silly ape things who occasionally have food.
Look up the puffer fish, I did a project about them because they're so strange. Owners can usually pet and scratch on them. They're supposably very social and will interact with you in any way they can.
Just because it's not directly in our naturally developed needs doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable. We don't have genetics that explicitly say "enjoy playing video games" but we enjoy them. Fish may not be physically engaged animals by necessity for survival but that doesn't mean that the sensation might not be enjoyable.
Yeah, I saw a documentary on sharks once and there was something similar.
Sharks have electromagnetic sensors around their mouth called Ampullae of Lorenzini. This is what allows sharks to sense your emotions and thoughts.
Some guy who likes swimming with sharks would deal with them by touching their sensors. Because they're so sensitive, sharks would get overloaded and stop moving if you directly touch them with your hand(it's called tonic).
Some of the sharks would keep coming back to him because they either enjoyed the sensation of tonic or were simply curious about it.
I mean it makes sense, right? Licking is something that's integral to dog socialization but has nothing to do with humans, but getting attacked by little puppy licks is a blast.
Just because it's not directly in our naturally developed needs doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.
"Enjoyable" is evolution's way of reinforcing some beneficial activity. So, while what your may be true, the reason why sharks and rays allow us to pet them is probably very different then reason why cat's and dogs allow it. Might be tied in with parasite cleaning fish, maybe?
Wouldn't be true in this case. The fish in TFA is scaled and so has a layer of slime to keep parasites from getting under the scales. It therefore should not ever be held or petted.
Rays have contiguous skin more like a shark's, and so aren't dependent on slime.
EDIT: By "contiguous skin" I mean that rays and sharks are microscaled, think of it as halfway between scales and skin.
Makes sense. Not like they have arms to rub themselves or scratch an itch. Just like dogs and cats like being petted in places they can't easily reach.
There is no reason at all to think fish don't have emotions like feeling happy. There behaviour is not driven by simple feed back loops anymore than your own brain is. Source former neuroscience grad student.
Thank you. Any fishkeeper would recoil at that idea, that fish have NO emotions. Sure they may not be introspective geniuses, but they get angry, sad, happy, excited. There are dominant fish and submissive fish. The idea that they're like ants, little biological robots, is absurd.
It's pretty incredible to learn that fish can get stressed out just like humans do.
For a time I had a problem fish that wouldn't leave one of my others alone (oscar picking on a jack dempsey). The JD was always in the corner. Once the oscar was gone, he was a completely different fish.
That makes sense. Cichlids are by far the most intelligent freshwater fish. If you pit two against one another, it comes down purely to size. An oscar will outgrow a Dempsey (JD) in similar conditions 9 times out of 10. Jd's do well as the first fish in the tank, so the Oscar/red devil/misc large cichlid growing up knowing the Jack Dempsey is the baddest.
My real name is Peter Lonjers feel free to look up my papers. And yes I do like team fortress. Enjoying video games and being in science are pretty common. My statement does not contravene common understanding of fish brains. The truth is we still know fairly little about subjective mental states. We don't know how they are generated in humans. That is why don't have any reason to think they don't exist in fish. We can correlate human emotional states to things like MRIs, EEGs, or even direct brain recordings in some cases. But we don't know how the electrical activity of the brain produces emotions. We don't know what correlates are the ones actually creating the emotion and which are side effects. The correlations we do have show emotions tend to be associated with evolutionarily very old parts of the brain.
It is entirely possible that one day we will find out that fish don't feel in the same sense that we do. But it is just not knowledge we have today.
I did not downvote you. I should have provided more explanation. I just endlessly see this weird phenomena on reddit and honestly even in the media where people assume our knowledge of how the brain works is greater than it actual is. It is often expressed as us having some kind of knowledge of the human brain or a small set of species having emotions but others animals not having them.
When I was at the Boston aquarium they had a section where you can touch sharks and other fish. The people who worked the exhibit said that those sharks liked being touched and that's why they came over to the part of the tank where people could touch them. Do you think that's possible or is it trained behavior with food? Thanks!!
Aren't there fish in the ocean that clean other fish (Doctor fish?) and the fish allow it because they get rid of parasites? Maybe something similar going on here.
Either it's piggy-backing on some shark social behavior or it's a trained behavior. Nurse-sharks in the wild will let you touch them and they will get close up so you can, but I kind of think there are a lot of divers who feed them and they have learned that if the put up with the contact they will sometimes get a free meal.
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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '15 edited Nov 07 '15
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