The thin blue line that separates land and water also represents a barrier to understanding and appreciating the diversity of experience and intelligence that exists below the surface. While many people are happy with the status quo that fish have a 3-second memory and cannot feel pain, ever-increasing empirical evidence (editor’s note, always avoid awkward alliteration) paints a different story.
After we published some fairly uncontroversial papers exploring cognitive traits in a social context, including transitive inference, contest memory, and adaptive forgetting, we really caused a stir when we found the cleaner wrasse could pass the mirror test.
Since then, we’ve moved all our work to the wild, trying to understand how cognitive traits are expressed in the environments in which they have evolved.
Here are some papers on aquatic cognition:
Tomasek M*, Soller K*, Jordan A. 2025. Wild fish use visual cues to recognise individual divers. Biology Letters. 19 February 2025
Tomasek M , Soller K, Dufour V Jordan A. 2024. Differences in inhibitory control in two species of Tanganyikan bower-building cichlids contrasting in building flexibility. Ecology and Evolution. 06 June 2024 https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.11406
Tomasek M , Stark M, Dufour V Jordan A. 2023. Exploration of cognitive flexibility in a Tanganyikan bower-building cichlid, Aulonocranus dewindti. Animal Cognition https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01830-w
Kohda M, Sogawa S, Jordan A, Kubo N, Awata S, Sato S, Kobayashi T, Fujita A, Bshary R. 2022. Further evidence for the capacity for mirror self-recognition in cleaner fish, and the significance of ecologically relevant marks. PLOS Biology February 17, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001529
Rodriguez-Santiago M*, Nuehrenberg P* Derry J, Deussen O, Francisco F, Garrison LK, Garza SF, Hofmann A, Jordan A. 2020. Behavioral traits that define social dominance are the same that reduce social influence in a consensus task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (31) 18566-18573. *co-first authors
Kohda M, Hotta T, Takeyama T, Yoshimura N, Jordan A. 2019. If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals? PLOS Biology https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021 February 7, 2019
The Behavioural Evolution Lab 