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Something worth remembering: visual discrimination in sharks

Animal Cognition volume 18, pages 463–471 (2015)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 17 December 2014

Abstract

This study investigated memory retention capabilities of juvenile gray bamboo sharks (Chiloscyllium griseum) using two-alternative forced-choice experiments. The sharks had previously been trained in a range of visual discrimination tasks, such as distinguishing between squares, triangles and lines, and their corresponding optical illusions (i.e., the Kanizsa figures or Müller–Lyer illusions), and in the present study, we tested them for memory retention. Despite the absence of reinforcement, sharks remembered the learned information for a period of up to 50 weeks, after which testing was terminated. In fish, as in other vertebrates, memory windows vary in duration depending on species and task; while it may seem beneficial to retain some information for a long time or even indefinitely, other information may be forgotten more easily to retain flexibility and save energy. The results of this study indicate that sharks are capable of long-term memory within the framework of selected cognitive skills. These could aid sharks in activities such as food retrieval, predator avoidance, mate choice or habitat selection and therefore be worth being remembered for extended periods of time. As in other cognitive tasks, intraspecific differences reflected the behavioral breadth of the species.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Slawa Braun for animal caretaking, maintenance and repairs. We are specifically grateful to the ‘Haus des Meeres’ in Vienna for supplying the animals used during this study. The research reported herein was performed under the guidelines established by the current German animal protection law.

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  1. Institute of Zoology, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn, Meckenheimer Allee 169, 53115, Bonn, Germany

    Theodora Fuss & Vera Schluessel

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  1. Theodora Fuss
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  2. Vera Schluessel
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Correspondence to Theodora Fuss.

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Fuss, T., Schluessel, V. Something worth remembering: visual discrimination in sharks. Anim Cogn 18, 463–471 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-014-0815-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-014-0815-3

Keywords

  • Elasmobranch
  • Chiloscyllium griseum
  • Visual memory
  • Memory retention
  • Visual discrimination
  • Optical illusion