Fish ecology and cognition: insights from studies on wild and wild-caught teleost fishes

Over the last decades, we witnessed a growing interest in animal cognition, in general, and in fish cognition, in particular. Here, we provide various study examples that employ an ecological approach to study cognition through field observations, field manipulations and laboratory tests on wild teleost fishes. In this review, we focus on cases with implications for understanding endotherm vertebrate cognition, that is, cases that show fishes possess supposedly 'complex' cognitive processes originally thought to warrant a more complex brain. Furthermore, in contrast to the classic interpretation of high/low performance as high/low cognitive abilities, incorporating an individual-level ecological approach reveals that low performance in a cognitive task may be caused by a mismatch between the experimental paradigm and the individual's experience. The future avenue for wild fish cognition is to grasp better how individual, population and species differences in performance stem from differences in their ecological conditions.

Automated summary

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in animal cognition, especially fish cognition. This review provides examples of studies that use an ecological approach to study cognition in wild teleost fishes through field observations, field manipulations, and laboratory tests. The focus is on cases that have implications for understanding cognitive processes in endotherm vertebrates, showing that fishes possess supposedly 'complex' cognitive processes originally thought to require a more complex brain.