The study also contributes to a growing body of scientific evidence that fish are more than mindless creatures that instinctively swim about in search of food and mates. "Our study shows that the male cichlid is obviously interacting with the world around it says Burmeister, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Fernald lab, now assistant professor of biology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "The subordinate male is responding to the absence of another individual, so he has to have some kind of understanding of what their relationship was in the past and what it is now. This implies a cognitive ability to process complex information, which is much more that we usually think of in fish."
